Arduino Uno Q

Coming soon. This guide has not been written yet - the board is not in the club’s hands. What follows is what the Uno Q is, why it is interesting, and what the tutorial will cover once we have one to write it against.

What It Is

The Uno Q keeps the Uno’s outline and shield header and puts two completely different processors behind it. One is a microcontroller of the kind every other board on this page uses. The other is a quad-core application processor running Linux - a Raspberry Pi-class computer, on the same board, sharing the same pins.

Microcontroller: an STM32U585 - Arm Cortex-M33, the part that does real-time GPIO, timing, and analogue work.
Application processor: a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 - four Cortex-A53 cores running a Debian-based Linux.
Memory: LPDDR4 RAM and on-board eMMC storage, in the gigabytes rather than kilobytes.
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB-C.
Form factor: the classic Uno outline, so existing shields still fit.

Specifications are from Arduino’s announcement and have not been verified against hardware by anyone here.

Why It Matters

Most interesting projects end up needing both halves of this. A microcontroller can hold a servo at an exact angle and sample a sensor on a precise interval, and cannot run a web app or a vision model. A Linux board can do both of those and cannot be trusted to toggle a pin at a predictable microsecond, because an operating system is scheduling it.

The usual answer is two boards and a serial link between them - which is exactly what our ESP32-CAM and Jetson Nano guides end up doing in different ways. The Uno Q puts both on one board with a shared toolchain, which is either a genuine simplification or a lot of complexity in a small space. That is the thing worth writing up honestly.

What the Guide Will Cover

First boot, and getting a shell on the Linux side.
Setting up Arduino App Lab, the environment that spans both processors.
Flashing a sketch to the microcontroller from the board itself.
Passing data between the Linux side and the sketch - the part that makes it one board rather than two.
A real task using both: precise sensor timing on the MCU, with the Linux side serving the results.
Where the shield compatibility actually holds, and where 3.3V logic breaks a 5V shield.
An honest comparison against a Pi plus a Nano, which costs less and is better documented.

When

When we get hardware, this page becomes a real guide. Until then it is here so the board is on the list rather than forgotten.

In the meantime, the Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 tutorials cover the two halves separately, which is the setup this board is trying to replace.