ARDUINO GOES PRO THE PORTENTA H7

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is traditionally where the big names in tech show off their upcoming products,and the 2020 show was no different. There were new smartphones,TVs,and home automation devices from all the usual suspects. Even a few electric vehicles snuck in there. But mixed in among flashy presentations from the electronics giants was a considerably more restrained announcement from a company near and dear to the readers of Hackaday: Arduino is going pro.

<img class="alignnone wp-image-3132" src="http://www.eduengteam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ARDUINO-GOES-PRO-THE-PORTENTA-H7-300x169.jpg" alt="ARDUINO GOES PRO THE PORTENTA H7" width="554" height="312" />

While Arduino has been focused on the DIY and educational market since its inception,<a href="https://store.arduino.cc/usa/portenta-h7" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the newly unveiled Portenta H7 is designed for professional users</a> who want to rapidly develop robust hardware suitable for industrial applications. With built-in wireless hardware and the ability to run Python and JavaScript out of the box,the powerful dual-core board comes with a similarly professional price tag; currently,for preorder at $99 USD a pop,the Portenta is priced well outside of the company’s traditional DIY and educational markets. With increased competition from other low-cost microcontrollers,it seems that Arduino is looking to expand out of its comfort zone and find new revenue streams.
<h2>THAT’S A LOT OF PINS</h2>
The Portenta H7 is obviously a far cry from the relatively dinky 8-bit Arduinos that we’ve all got filling up our parts drawers. Developed for high-performance edge computing applications,the new board is powered by a 32-bit STM32H747XI that utilizes both an ARM Cortex M7 and an M4 running at 480 MHz and 240 MHz respectively. The two cores can work independently,allowing,for example,one core to run interpreted Python while the other runs code compiled in the Arduino IDE. When they need to work together,the cores can communicate with each other via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism.
<h2>ARDUINO GOES PRO THE PORTENTA H7</h2>
<figure id="attachment_394639" class="wp-caption alignleft" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-394639"><a href="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img class="wp-image-394639 size-large" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg?w=482" sizes="(max-width: 482px) 100vw,482px" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg 482w,https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg?resize=250,108 250w,https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg?resize=400,173 400w" alt="" width="482" height="209" data-attachment-id="394639" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/new-part-day-arduino-goes-pro-with-the-portenta-h7/portenta_back/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg" data-orig-size="482,209" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="portenta_back" data-image-description="" data-medium-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg?w=400" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/portenta_back.jpg?w=482" /></a>
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-394639" class="wp-caption-text">The new 80-pin connectors on the Portent</figcaption></figure>
Outwardly,the new board doesn’t look far removed from the modern Arduino form factor we’re used to. The USB connector has been upgraded to a Type-C,but the Portenta still retains the dual rows of pads ready for hand-soldered headers — that’s their more recent pinout that they call the Arduino MKR form factor.

If you look on the back of the board,however,you’ll see that they’ve added two 80-pin high-density connectors. According to the product page,these are intended to allow the Portenta to simply be plugged into a device as a removable module. The idea is that devices in the field can easily have their Portenta swapped out for an upgraded model. Some digging into the product page documentation section turns up a schematic that lists the connectors as <a href="https://www.hirose.com/product/p/CL0684-4001-8-51" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hirose DF40C-80DP-0.4V(51)</a>.

The base model Portenta features 8 MB SDRAM and 16 MB NOR flash,but it can be custom ordered with up to 64 MB of memory and 128 MB of flash should you need it. It’s also possible to delete various interfaces from the board when ordering,so if you don’t want network connectivity or the NXP SE050C2 crypto chip,they can simply be left off. However,as of this writing,it is unclear as to what minimum order quantity is necessary to unlock this level of customization,or how much these modifications will change the unit cost.
<h2>WHERE DOES PORTENTA FIT?</h2>
We can’t even speculate what a maxed out Portenta would cost,and there’s no pricing or release date for the Carrier Board. But even at $99,the base model Portenta H7 would be a tough sell for hackers and makers who are used to buying dual-core ESP32 boards at 1/10 of the price,or <a href="https://hackaday.com/2019/08/07/new-teensy-4-0-blows-away-benchmarks-implements-self-recovery-returns-to-smaller-form/">the Teensy 4.0 which has a 600 MHz Cortex-M7</a> at 1/4 of the price. Which is fine,since this board isn’t intended for the traditional core Arduino audience.

Seeing the carrier board,we can’t help but notice some parallels here with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. With connections broken out to a SODIMM header,the idea of the Compute Module was to help bridge the gap between the DIY community and the commercial one by offering up a Raspberry Pi in a more rugged form factor that would be easier to integrate into end-user products. But since it wasn’t any cheaper than the stock Pi,there wasn’t a whole lot of incentive to switch over. We haven’t seen consumer products advertising “Raspberry Pi Inside!” so it’s hard to tell if there has been any meaningful adoption from the industry.

One has to wonder why any company that has the resources to integrate such an expensive board into their products wouldn’t just come up with their own custom design around the Portenta’s STM32H747XI chip,which even in single quantities,can currently be had for less than $15. The difference may end up coming down to the world-renowned community that surrounds the Arduino brand,and <a href="https://hackaday.com/2019/10/21/the-arduino-ide-finally-grows-up/">the company’s efforts to modernize their toolchain</a>.

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ARDUINO GOES PRO THE PORTENTA H7

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ARDUINO GOES PRO THE PORTENTA H7

ARDUINO GOES PRO THE PORTENTA H7

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