Arduino Updates Its UNO Q, VENTUNO Q App Lab to Bring "Custom Bricks" Support for Modular Making

Arduino's work on the App Lab that goes with its UNO Q and VENTUNO Q single-board computers continues apace, with the company announcing an App Lab 0.7 — bringing with it the ability to create your own modular "brick" building blocks.

"Remember at Arduino Days when we teased something that would fundamentally change how you build with App Lab? That moment is here," the Arduino team says of the new release. "Arduino App Lab 0.7 introduces Custom Bricks and with it, the power to extend the apps for your Arduino UNO Q board and enjoy more creative freedom. Alongside this release, we are also introducing a new documentation experience designed to make learning App Lab feel more natural and intuitive from the very first step."

Teased back in March as part of the Arduino Days event, App Lab Live Bricks allow users to create their own program building blocks — expanding on the pre-written Bricks available in earlier versions of the App Lab, the dedicated integrated development environment for the "dual-brain architecture" Arduino UNO Q and VENTUNO Q single-board computers with integrated microcontroller coprocessors. "Custom Bricks transform App Lab from a powerful tool into an extensible platform," the Arduino team promises. "Build something once, package it as a Brick, and reuse it across every app you create. Connect to databases and integrate AI [Artificial Intelligence] models. If you can code it in Python, you can make a Brick out of it."

In its current incarnation, the Custom Bricks system offers two variants: "Python-only Bricks" that effectively take the form of a Python library packaged as a Brick; and "Python + Container Bricks," which include your own Docker container to run on the Linux half of the development board. "During Arduino Days, our colleague Davide [Neri] demonstrated Custom Bricks by building an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Brick from scratch, live on stage. He took an object detection example, created a custom Brick, added a Docker container running Tesseract OCR, wrote the Python interface, and had working text recognition in a matter of minutes."

The new App Lab release also brings with it a redesigned Console panel, which is now integrated into the development environment itself instead of appearing as separate tab, adds support for drag-and-drop management of the file tree, and comes with improved documentation "organized by user journey and feature," the Arduino team explains, "with clear sections for getting started, setup, Bricks, and apps."

The new Arduino App Lab 0.7 is available to download for free on the Arduino site now, with source code available under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3 on GitHub; those experimenting with the platform are also invited to join our Invent the Future with Arduino UNO Q and App Lab competition, in partnership with Arduino, Qualcomm, Edge Impulse, and others, to be in with a chance of winning a share in a prize pool valued at $20,000.