At this year’s CES, Arduino announced its Portenta family of IoT modules. The first addition to the Portenta line is the H7, created for industrial applications, robotics and AI edge processing. The Portenta H7 is a dual-core Arm Cortex-M7 and Cortex-M4 operating at 480MHz and 240MHz, respectively, and is designed to function at a temperature range of -40°C to 85°C. The module is capable of running Arduino code, Python and JavaScript, making it accessible to a larger number of developers and capable of kick-starting a variety of IoT hardware platforms.
According to Arduino CEO Fabio Violante, “Portenta H7 is directly compatible with most Arduino libraries and offers new features that will benefit makers, such as Display Port out, fast multi-channel ADC and high-speed timers. With so much horsepower, it’s easy to imagine applications for robotics, vision, drones, CNC/3D printing, etc.”
In addition, the H7’s onboard wireless module allows users to simultaneously manage Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The Wi-Fi interface can be operated as an access point, a station or a dual mode AP/STA, and can handle a transfer rate of up to 65Mbps.
Speaking of the module’s compact size, Violante stated that “The same footprint allows swapping modules that range from high-performance Cortex-M with traditional peripherals to Cortex-A application processors with PCIe, USB 3, DisplayPort, etc. The high number of pins in a small footprint allows reducing the size of the final application, allowing miniaturization while still preserving robustness and signal integrity.”
As IoT modules expand the number of available features while shrinking their footprint, the range of hardware possibilities available to developers at lower costs will no doubt continue to increase.
The Portenta H7 will be available in February 2020. For more information, visit Arduino’s website.