Arduino releases the Arduino VENTUNO Q robotics board, and its own pages disagree on its power input

Arduino, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies, announced the Arduino VENTUNO Q on August 25, 2026, a single-board computer for robots and edge AI with two processors. Arduino says the board’s Qualcomm processor delivers “up to 40 dense TOPS” of AI performance, beside a second chip for real-time control of motors. Its own documents disagree on how the board is powered: the store page states a USB-C input that works out below the peak Arduino itself measured. Qualcomm’s press release that day gave no price. We have not tested the board, so every performance and power figure below is Arduino’s or Qualcomm’s claim.

Takeaway points

• Arduino, a Qualcomm subsidiary, announced the VENTUNO Q on August 25, 2026, a board for robots that pairs a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 processor with an STM32 microcontroller.
• Arduino’s datasheet recommends a power supply of 60 W or greater for heavy workloads and says the processor module needs active cooling, while its store page states a USB-C input of 5 V and 3 A.
• No document we read says how the 40 TOPS figure was measured, and we have not tested the board or any figure claimed for it.

What is the Arduino VENTUNO Q?

The Arduino VENTUNO Q is a single-board computer with two processors, one for AI models and one for motors, made by Arduino with a Qualcomm chip at its centre. Arduino is a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies, and both companies published on the same day: Qualcomm a press release, Arduino a blog post.

Neither of those two documents states a price. Qualcomm’s release has a section headed “Availability and Pricing” that contains no price. The only figure is on Arduino’s store pages, which on October 5, 2026 listed the board at $299.00 in the United States and 298.99 euros in Europe, the second with “VAT included”. Both pages call that an “Introductory price” and neither gives a regular one.

What is on the VENTUNO Q board, according to Arduino?

Arduino’s datasheet lists a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 processor running Linux and an STMicroelectronics STM32H5F5 microcontroller for real-time control. Arduino calls this a “dual-brain architecture”. The Linux side runs AI models and the microcontroller side drives motors and industrial signals. The store says the two chips talk to each other through “an RPC bridge”, which is Arduino’s description and not something we have checked.

Two details in the datasheet qualify the headline figures. The M.2 drive is described as “non-bootable”, so the operating system stays on the 64 GB of eMMC. And the 25.8 mm height is given “without the SoM heatsink and fan”. The datasheet says the processor module “requires active cooling for sustained operation at full performance” and refers to an “included heatsink and fan assembly”. It warns that heavy workloads without adequate cooling may trigger thermal throttling, which reduces performance.

The datasheet spells TOPS out as “Tera Operations Per Second”. None of the documents we read explains what “dense” means in the 40 TOPS figure or how it was measured.

Arduino says the board accepts Arduino UNO shields, Raspberry Pi HATs through a 40-pin header, and Arduino’s Modulino nodes through a Qwiic connector. The store page lists ROS 2 compatibility. That is the same robot software world as Qualcomm’s agreement to acquire PickNik Robotics, the company behind the MoveIt software.

How much power does the VENTUNO Q need?

Arduino’s datasheet recommends a power supply of 60 W or greater for heavy workloads. Neither store page lists what is in the box.

The datasheet says the board “requires a PD-capable supply of at least 9 V to start” when powered by USB-C. It adds that a fault light may blink if the board is plugged into a computer or a USB-C port without Power Delivery. Its input table gives USB-C at 20 V and up to 3 A, which is 60 W by our arithmetic. A barrel jack takes 12 to 24 V and a screw terminal takes 7 to 24 V.

Arduino also published its own power measurements, taken with a power analyzer at 24.4 C. These are the figures for USB-C at 20 V.

The highest peak Arduino recorded on any input was 36.6 W, in the Smart Mirror example on a 24 V supply. The datasheet adds that the processor module alone can draw about 23 to 25 W in the worst case. We have not measured any of this.

What software does the VENTUNO Q run, and which licences apply?

The board ships with Ubuntu on the Linux side and the Arduino Core on Zephyr on the microcontroller, according to Arduino’s blog post and Qualcomm’s release. The blog post says Ubuntu is “distributed by Canonical” and bundled with an Ubuntu Pro licence for security updates. Docker and apt are installed, the store says, and the board can be programmed with VS Code or native Linux tools.

Arduino’s own tool is Arduino App Lab, which is preloaded. An App combines a Python program on the Linux side, an Arduino sketch on the microcontroller, and optional “Bricks”, which are packaged services such as AI models. The blog post names version 0.10.0 and says it has more than 100 examples for the board.

The model library on the store page is: Qwen 3 4B; Qwen 2.5 7B and Qwen 3 4B vision models; Gemma 4 E2B and E4B; Whisper; Melo and Piper for speech; YoloX; and MediaPipe gesture recognition. Arduino says a GGUF model can also be loaded through a llama.cpp Brick. We have not run a model on this board. GGUF is the same file format used in our guide to importing a local GGUF file into Ollama, which was written for a Mac and not for this board.

On licences, Arduino’s product pages say little. The blog post promises “No proprietary toolchain. No lock-in.” The documentation page offers the schematics, CAD files and pinout as downloads, and we found no licence statement in the text of the datasheet or the schematics. For the software, the licence field GitHub shows on Arduino’s own repositories reads as follows.

Qualcomm’s release also names GenieX, which it calls an “open-source on-device Gen AI runtime”, without stating a licence. Each AI model in the library carries its own maker’s terms, which Arduino’s pages do not list. For another robotics company opening its code, see Intrinsic, a Google unit, releasing parts of its robot software platform as open source.

Where do Arduino’s and Qualcomm’s VENTUNO Q documents disagree?

They disagree on four points we could find: the price, the processor’s name, Debian support and the USB-C power input.

The last row is a contradiction about how the board is powered. The store’s figure works out at 15 W, by our arithmetic, which is below the 25.6 W peak Arduino measured for its own AI assistant example. The datasheet’s revision history shows a fourth revision on September 29, 2026, described as “Updating values for inputs”. The store pages still showed the 5 V line six days later.

What has Arduino not published about the VENTUNO Q, and have we tested it?

We have not tested the VENTUNO Q. We have no board, and this piece rests on Qualcomm’s release, Arduino’s blog post, its two store pages, its documentation page, its datasheet and its schematics, all read on October 5, 2026.

No document we read says how the 40 TOPS figure was measured, or how fast any of the listed models runs on the board. The release says production modules from SECO and Toradex “will soon be available”, with no date or price. And the hardware design files are downloadable with no licence stated on the pages we read.