Qualcomm has unveiled the Arduino VENTUNO Q, a new board announced at Embedded World 2026, designed to bring artificial intelligence development to the edge and into the physical world.
The VENTUNO Q takes its name from the Italian word for twenty-one, and the popular Arduino UNO family, as the open-source hardware provider celebrates its twenty-first anniversary later this month.
Arduino VENTUNO Q: Bringing Intelligence to the Edge
The new board combines high-performance AI computing with deterministic, real-time control, enabling systems that can both interpret and interact with their surroundings.
Based on a dual-brain architecture similar to the Arduino UNO Q, the VENTUNO Q significantly enhances capabilities by leveraging the Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 series chips for both traditional and generative AI workloads. It also features NPU acceleration offering up to 40 TOPS, alongside a dedicated STM32H5 microcontroller for low-latency actuation and motor control. The board includes 16 Gbytes of RAM – capable of handling concurrent inference and complex multitasking – and 64 Gbytes of expandable internal storage.
With VENTUNO Q, users can prototype and develop solutions for a variety of fields, running fully autonomous AI agents offline. Potential applications include:
- AI-Powered Systems: Completely offline AI voice assistants running local LLM models; smart mirrors responding to gestures; tourist kiosks, healthcare check-in counters, or transportation hubs leveraging automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) at the edge.
- Robotics and Motion Control: Precise pick-and-place robotic arms guided by vision; service robots that recognize and follow their owners in dynamic environments; autonomous robots navigating complex environments independently using Visual SLAM and route optimization.
- AI Edge Vision and Detection Systems: Proactive security systems detecting dangerous behaviors; traffic monitoring devices processing complex data at the edge; automated quality inspection utilizing local VLMs to detect minute defects or missing components.
- Education and Research: VENTUNO Q can serve as a key tool for teaching everything from computer vision to generative AI at the edge, and is an ideal platform for rapidly prototyping functional prototypes in record time.
Designed to “Democratize Innovation”
VENTUNO Q can connect to a PC or be used as a single-board computer (SBC). Unlike general-purpose AI SBCs, it’s designed from the ground up for machines that move, react, and manipulate. In addition to tightly integrating a real-time MCU and an NPU-accelerated MPU, the hardware features:
- Industrial I/O including native CAN-FD, PWM, and high-speed GPIO for precise physical control.
- ROS 2-ready workflows and robotics use cases are integrated directly into the platform.
- High-speed connectors for multiple MIPI-CSI cameras (with the ability to process multiple AI-powered streams), advanced audio, displays, and 2.5 GbE Ethernet.
Combined with unparalleled hardware compatibility – VENTUNO Q works immediately with UNO shields and carriers, Arduino Modulino nodes, and Qwiic sensors, as well as Raspberry Pi Hats – these features make it one of the most flexible and user-friendly edge AI ecosystems for developers. Arduino VENTUNO Q will be available in the second quarter of 2026 on the manufacturer’s official store and through its network of official distributors.
