Trying out the Arduino Uno Q - A quick and dirty overview

 Trying out the Arduino Uno Q - A quick and dirty overview

 Love it or hate it, it... exists 

 With the release of the new Arduino Uno Q board, I decided to get one and try it out. After a few days of playing around and experimentation I have to say I'm less than impressed.

 The concept seems to be a solid one, combining a standard Micro-Processor Unit (MPU) with a Microcontroller Unit (MCU), but the execution has been a little rough.

 The first and main thing to probably address is the Bridge concept, which is a way for users to make the MCU 'talk' to the MPU. It is driven by a serial connection running at 115200 baud, using RPC, which altogether is far too slow to pass copious amounts of data, or do it really quickly. It is also limited in what can be sent, so trying to pass arrays or data structures between the systems is out of the question. On the other hand, it can be used to pass information between programs, be it Python to Python or C++ (Arduino) to Python.

 One of the first things I tried, of course, is running RF24 radio based applications. It appears to work OK initially with the core RF24 driver and RF24Network, but once I got into the RF24Mesh layers, I started to notice the limitations. The MCU along with SPI + GPIO capabilities appear to be a little too slow for the device to function as a regular RF24Mesh node, without modifying a #define within the RF24Network_config.h file that regulates response times. Essentially, it is too slow. It will function normally as a master RF24Mesh node, but won't be nearly as fast as a Raspberry Pi.

Next, I attempted to create a basic TUN network interface in Linux using Python, to see about creating a RF24Gateway like interaction, but realized quickly that this too was outside the general capabilities of the device. It runs a Python virtual environment within a Docker container, with no apparent way to configure things, so I can't seem to get it working. That means an RF24Gateway style library is out of the question for now.

It seems that so much of what I've tried do to so far just doesn't work. There was also a forced, breaking update that happened recently, to version 3.0, where users have to manually download a new version of App Lab in order to program their devices.

 Some of the features still seem promising, the ability to easily incorporate "Bricks" and features into your programs, and the underlying software for the MPU is Debian/Linux along with Arduino, so you can still do a lot with it. 

I don't think I'll get another one, but I will definitely be playing around with the one I've got for a while. 

In the meantime, I've included a new example in the RF24 core library that users can try with the Arduino Uno Q that allows users to configure the radio and print debug information.

I've also added an example sketch to go along with the stock RF24 GettingStarted example here:

https://github.com/TMRh20/Sketches/tree/master/ArduinoQ