Arduino Portenta

August 24, 2021

For a recent project, I’ve been using a new Arduino Pro board called the Arduino Portenta. It has proved to be a powerful board but as it is new, I am having to discover how to use it.

First look at the Portenta H7

One of the biggest challenges for this board is that it runs on a new firmware. This is based on the MBed Operating System, it is also a different processor to the earlier models. So many of the libraries have yet to been ported across to this platform and it is difficult to decide if to use Arduino, MBed or STM32 API calls to achieve the results you want when porting.

Porting Neopixels to the Portenta

Also, if you combine it with the vision shield then all the examples are written for MicroPython. I even considered recompiling a custom version of this with the features I needed.

Cross Compiling MicroPython

I also discovered some cool features such as the flashing red light that appears when you crash the operating system. Slowly I’ve got the various components working that I need, neopixels, camera, eink display, tensor flow. So hopefully you’ll get to hear about the project before too long.

By Andy from Workshopshed Add Comment

  Posted in: Electronics