[News from Armbian] - My first embedded world and I already can't wait for the next

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I'd been putting this off for years. Every March, I'd read someone else's embedded world recap, tell myself "next year", and go back to my terminal. This year I actually went and I'm still processing everything I saw.

First things first: the team

Before I talk about any stand or chip, I need to tell you what made this trip different from anything I've done before. There were five of us from the Armbian team at the show: Igor, Werner, Meko, amazingfate, and me. Five people. Four countries. Some of us had worked together for years and never met in person.

You know how it is in open-source, you collaborate through GitHub, you argue about patches on the mailing list, you review each other's code at odd hours. But you don't always know the face behind the username. Meeting those people for real, shaking their hand, having a coffee together, that's something no pull request can replicate. And honestly, it was worth the trip on its own.

The show itself: I wasn't ready for this

Arriving at the Nuremberg Messe for the first time is a genuine shock. I knew embedded world was big. I did not know it was this big. Enormous halls, thousands of exhibitors, tens of thousands of attendees. On day one I got genuinely lost between the pavilions spent a solid half hour wandering with no idea where I was. I'm told this is a rite of passage.

What surprised me most about the atmosphere is how concrete everything felt. This isn't a conference where people pitch vaporware from behind polished booths. Engineers and developers everywhere, talking about real problems, showing real hardware. You can walk from a giant like Qualcomm to a small team doing something fascinating with a handful of sensors and both conversations feel equally substantive.

What we saw on the floor

Rockchip was a mandatory stop for us, and they didn't disappoint. On their stand: the RK3572 EVB an evaluation board we hadn't seen in person before. Reading specs in a datasheet is one thing. Seeing the board running, understanding its real-world size, its connectors, how it behaves, that's a completely different kind of knowledge. The kind you can only get by showing up.

Rockchip Employees (Most left and right) and Jianfeng Liu, Mecid Urganci & Igor Pecovnik

Seeed Studio had live demos of AI Vision and AI Sound, and the one that genuinely impressed me was their AI camera with a built-in NPU doing real-time object recognition. I'm not talking about laggy, stuttering inference, it was smooth. Fluid. The kind of performance that makes you stop walking and just stare for a minute. Seeing that level of real-time AI running on a compact edge device was one of those moments where the future stops feeling abstract.

Seedstudio x Armbian (Maximilian Riedl , Igor Pecovnik, Jianfeng Liu, Daniele Briguglio)

Qualcomm brought the Arduino Ventuno Q, and this is where things got interesting and a little funny. meko had already run his benchmarks on the board when amazingfate noticed something: Chromium's hardware acceleration wasn't enabled. So he enabled it. Right there. Directly on the board. In front of the stand staff.

The reaction from the Qualcomm team? Complete, genuine astonishment. They didn't see it coming. That's what happens when you bring a group of Armbian developers to a trade show, we don't just look at things, we poke at them.

Armbian at the Foundries.io booth

Collabora was present at the show, and amazingfate got to meet some of the team. Their kernel and GPU driver work is always relevant to what we do, so that conversation mattered even if I wasn't there for it personally.

The moment that hit hardest: Armbian on the BeagleBadge

During a meeting with the BeagleBoard.org team inside the show, they showed us their brand new project: the BeagleBadge. Launched right there at embedded world 2026, it won Best in Show in the Wearables category; a Linux-powered wearable badge with a 4.2" ePaper display, dual-core ARM Cortex-A53, Wi-Fi 6, LoRa, and more sensors than I can list here. Built around the Texas Instruments AM62L32, manufactured by Seeed Studio.

Impressive hardware. But here's the part that actually stopped me in my tracks: Armbian was running on it. There's an official "Armbian BeagleBadge demo for EW2026" image — Debian Trixie, Linux 6.12 — listed right on the BeagleBoard.org site.

Our OS. On a Best-in-Show winning badge. At the world's biggest embedded show.

That's not a small thing. That's the community's work showing up exactly where it matters.

What embedded world taught me about where this industry is going

Three days of walking, talking, and observing gives you a pretty clear picture of the currents moving through the embedded world right now.

Edge AI is not a trend anymore, it's infrastructure. Every major vendor had something running inference locally, without cloud, on modest hardware. This is real, it's shipping, and it's going to reshape what we expect embedded systems to do.

Open-source has earned its seat at the table. I half-expected it to be the hobbyist corner of the show. It wasn't. Companies are building on Linux, on open stacks, on ecosystems maintained by communities like ours. That's not charity, it's strategy. And it means the work we do in Armbian matters more than we sometimes give ourselves credit for.

The line between prototype and product is razor thin. At most stands you'd see a mix: shipping products, reference designs, things that will exist in six months. That gap is where the interesting information lives; what's coming, which platforms are getting serious investment, which vendors are committed to mainline Linux support. You don't learn that from a datasheet. You learn it by being there.

Would I go back?

Without a second thought.

If you're an Armbian community member who's been putting this off the same way I was stop putting it off. The technical exposure is valuable. The networking is real. And meeting the people you build things with, face to face, is something that doesn't have a substitute.

The show runs every year in Nuremberg. I'll be there.

See you in 2027. 🇩🇪

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