Arduino Portenta H7

Arduino is busy establishing a strong position in the professional market. The release of the Arduino Portenta H7 is a very important step in this. The portenta H7 cannot be compared to the standard Arduino boards† The planned delivery date was the end of March. Unfortunately, due to the covid-19 virus, it will take longer.
UPDATE 10/07/2020: Delivery will take place mid-August. The Portenta H7 is HERE can already be ordered.

The Arduino Portenta family currently consists of the Portenta H7 and the carrier. This new Arduino family has been developed for the professional market. Specifically aimed at SMEs and industry. The Arduino MKR family was the first step towards a new branch of Arduino. But with the Portenta family a lot will really change. Arduino told us during the ”global partner conference”In 2019 that they will focus on 3 branches from now on. Namely education, hobby and professional. There were already a lot of products for the first two categories. However, there was not yet something specific for the professional.

The Portenta H7 can be programmed using different programming languages. You can work with:

• Arduino sketches on top of the Arm® Mbed ™ OS
• Native Mbed ™ applications
• MicroPython / JavaScript
• TensorFlow™ Lite

The main processor of the Arduino Portenta H7 is the dual-core STM32H747. The two cores communicate via a Remote Procedure Call mechanism. This allows for seamless functions on the other processor. The built-in wireless module allows to manage WiFi and Bluetooth® connectivity at the same time. The WiFi interface can be used as an access point, as a station or as a dual-mode simultaneous AP / STA and can handle a transfer rate of up to 65 Mbps. Bluetooth® interface supports Bluetooth Classic and BLE. 

Both the Portenta H7 and the MKR family have the same form factor. This has been improved in the portenta family with an 80-pin connector. Full documentation of the pinout and datasheets can be found on the Arduino website.

The Portenta H7 follows the Arduino MKR form factor, but has been enhanced with the Portenta family high-density 80-pin connector. Read more about the board pinout by reading the board pinout documentation.

Our experience

Unfortunately we are still waiting for our Portenta H7. Our expectations for this new board very high. With Arduino Nano BLE Sense it is already possible to Tenser flow to use. But we expect this to go even better with the Portenta H7. We are very much looking forward to getting started with machine learning. Arduino is well on the way to establishing a name in the professional market. 

Who is the Portenta H7 for?

As mentioned earlier, the Portenta H7 has been developed for the professional market. This is absolutely evident in the available performance. The Portenta H7 is suitable for tasks where performance is essential. Some examples of this are:

• High-quality industrial machines
• Laboratory equipment
• Computer vision
• PLCs
• Industry-ready user interfaces
• Robotics controller
• Mission critical devices
• Dedicated stationary computer
• Fast start-up calculation (ms)

Specifications Portenta H7?

Perhaps most interesting are the tech specs. Below is the full list.