As an extremely brief backgrounder, both the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are fundamentally microcontrollers, single-board computers programmed to control processes or other devices. As a basic example, an industrial robot, a home security system, etc. They have astounding capability limited by your imagination and programming/electronics skills.

First, the good news.

The Raspberry Pi people are/have released a new Pi 500+ with a redesigned Pi in a keyboard with mechanical switches for $200! The Pi board is of a new design with "...16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, a 256GB NVMe SSD instead of microSD storage, and a fancier keyboard with mechanical switches, replaceable keycaps, and individually programmable RGB LEDs." Like all Pi's, it runs their version of Linux by default, though other versions of Linux can be booted on it.

This is VERY cool! The SSD can be swapped for higher capacity devices, and it can still be booted from MicroSD cards.

It also sports "... integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, two micro HDMI ports that support 60 Hz 4K output, a microSD slot, and a user-accessible 40-pin GPIO header for additional expandability."

Here's the best part: TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS! An absolutely screaming deal for a full-on hobbyist computer that is also fully-expandable for a controller system to do whatever the heck you want to do with it!

I am definitely going to get me one of these puppies. I was interested in the relaunch of the Commodore 64, but then I started thinking about whether or not I wanted to bother with programming in Basic, and the answer to that was a solid NO. But this? I can have some fun with this! Now, if the Commodore people succeed in launching an Amiga - that's a different story! Time will tell if that happens.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/raspberry-pi-supercharges-its-keyboard-pc-with-16gb-ram-ssd-mechanical-switches/


Now the bad news.

Qualcomm is buying Arduino.

They claim that they are keeping a hands-off approach, we shall see if that stays true. They completely burned all faith and goodwill of the VMWare customer base in that particular acquisition, and already Arduino hobbyists are looking to new platforms and clones to move away from Arduino-branded microcontrollers in anticipation of what they think is likely to happen.

While the obvious jump would be to Raspberry Pi since they're both microcontrollers, the two platforms are apples and oranges and a lot of Arduino projects are not correctly served by trying to port over to Pi. Those people are likely in for a more difficult if they want to move to a different hardware platform. Some people can move their projects over to Pi with some work, and good for them.

And it's not just hobbyists using these controllers, for some people it's their profession and livelihood. If Qualcomm starts jerking them around, then they may have the unhappy prospect of making a business case to management to change vendors and possibly controllers. If their use is strictly in-house, that's one thing. If they're selling products using these controllers, it's quite another.

From one angle, it's not a bad acquisition for Qualcomm as they already make the CPUs for Arduino. And clearly the Arduino company folk benefit by getting many very large buckets of cash. The question will be in how well Qualcomm treats the customer base, and considering how they treated the VMWare folks over the last couple of years....

Time will tell.

From the Slashdot summary:
Smartphone processor and modem maker Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino, the Italian company known mainly for its open source ecosystem of microcontrollers and the software that makes them function. In its announcement, Qualcomm said that Arduino would "[retain] its brand and mission," including its "open source ethos" and "support for multiple silicon vendors." Qualcomm didn't disclose what it would pay to acquire Arduino. The acquisition also needs to be approved by regulators "and other customary closing conditions."

The first fruit of this pending acquisition will be the Arduino Uno Q, a Qualcomm-based single-board computer with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor installed. The QRB2210 includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU and a Qualcomm Adreno 702 GPU, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and combines that with a real-time microcontroller "to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/arduino-retains-its-brand-and-mission-following-acquisition-by-qualcomm/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/07/2032219/qualcomm-is-buying-arduino-releases-new-raspberry-pi-esque-arduino-board

The legend? The Zilog Z80 CPU.

Talk about a heck of a run! Could you imagine Intel still making Pentium II's today? But that Z80 has kept truckin' along for almost five decades! Talk about an incredible design. While it was a general purpose CPU like those made by Intel and AMD and others today, its low power consumption and well-understood programming and foibles made it very popular for embedded device controllers. I told a friend of mine who thinks he's a tech geek and holds a degree in EE, and he'd never heard of it! He's slightly younger than me, but not that much, he was never a generalist. The Z80 was a backbone for the C/PM and M/PM operating system and S100 bus architecture, which was what computing was done on before in the '70s and '80s until the IBM PC and Mac began revolutionizing and bringing it all to the rest of us.

From the Techspot article: "Federico Faggin, an Intel engineer, founded Zilog in 1974 after his work on the Intel 4004, the first 4-bit CPU. The Zilog Z80 was then released in July 1976, conceived as a software-compatible "extension" and enhancement of the Intel 8080 processor.

Developed by a team of just 12 people, the Z80 saw remarkable success, leading Zilog to establish its own chip manufacturing plants and expand to over a thousand employees within two years. Like its Intel counterpart, the Z80 was originally designed for embedded systems but went on to become a significant milestone in gaming hardware from the 1970s to the mid-1980s."

and

"Several home computers and gaming consoles were built around the capabilities of the Z80, including Sega's Master System and SG-1000, and Nintendo's Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Many classic arcade games also used the Z80, including the original version of Pac-Man. Additionally, the 8-bit processor was common in military applications, musical synthesizers like the Roland Jupiter-8, and various other electronic devices."

So pour one out - but not on! - the Z80.

While the Z80 is going away, its legacy lives on in the eZ80 and newer iterations of the classic chip.

https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80-microprocessor-after-almost-50-years.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/04/20/1916203/the-legendary-zilog-z80-cpu-is-being-discontinued-after-nearly-50-years

To hell with those decadent Westerners and their XBoxes and PlayStations and their LGBTQ propaganda! We're going to go with solid Russian craftsmanship and story-telling!

Now, I have absolutely no doubt that Russian game developers could create some truly compelling stories. Every nation has great story-tellers. And there's no doubt that they have great programmers, though far too many are involved in cybercrime. I think their goal of producing such a console by a '26-'27 deadline is perhaps overly ambitious, but hey, what do I know?

https://gamerant.com/russia-gaming-consoles/

The Slashdot comments are amusing:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/03/29/2244215/russia-is-making-its-own-gaming-consoles


Oh! I know what I know! Russian chip foundries are foundering with a chip packaging defect rate of 50%! And that's PACKAGING the chips, not MAKING them. The Chinese are making the chips, sending them to Russia for PACKAGING. So the Russians are receiving discs (I assume) that contain hundreds of chips that have to be precisely cut up, then packaged into housings with leads attached for later integration into circuit boards and such for use in various electronic devices.

Except they can't reliably, in large batches. Apparently they can do small batches okay, but large batches are beyond their ability.

The problem seems to be quality control, calibration of the devices, and workforce skill set.

Clearly first-world problems.

Oh, I forgot. Russia isn't a first-world nation. Except they have nukes, and a seemingly nutso war-monger leader. There are lots of brilliant scientists and engineers in Russia, and I feel sorry for them living in such constraints. We've had several Russian astronomers who've worked at the observatory, and I've worked with Russian programmers before. Brilliant people, once you figure out how to work with the language barriers.

This is why I mourned the turn they took when the nutjob former KGB station chief became the leader. I knew he'd never let go. They had a chance of turning around Russia when the USSR fell apart, they had a chance of becoming a free nation and elevating themselves, but then the criminal class took over and it became a kleptocracy, and it's now a mess.

I really can't see things improving until there's another October Revolution and the people literally seize the state again, which will be a massive bloodbath. Maybe they can start over, maybe the criminal class will simply seize power again.

It's a little unclear as to whether these chips are strictly consumer-grade or intended possibly for military use. A lot of military applications don't need anything much more sophisticated than an 8088, but when you're talking drones or night vision goggles, you're needing much later chips and packaging.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/half-of-russian-made-chips-are-defective-baikal-struggles-to-meet-russias-demand