TREND
Arduino Portenta H7: the 'monster' for the professional market
With the presentation at CES 2020 in Las Vegas of the new Portenta board — based on ARM's Mbed platform, capable of hosting conventional sketches alongside a microPython interpreter and TensorFlow Lite — Arduino's new professional trend is increasingly clear.
It was certainly no secret, nor a novelty, that Arduino was increasingly aiming at the professional industrial-electronics market.
After having been a real revolution — effectively democratising microcontroller technology — and after a long period of absence from the market due to the well-known events that generated a true battle for ownership of the Arduino brand, and after reaching a new corporate set-up, the new Company — no longer just a Community — had returned to the spotlight in the maker sector with an operation differentiating itself from the now numerous microcontroller and PC-on-board cards aimed at the more hobbyist segment.
With the introduction of the MKR family and the new ‘Nano’ boards, Arduino has long aimed at the more professional market, identifying the development of its own IoT platform as its new target.
The new positioning appears sensible, especially considering that the Arduino model — after being snubbed for years by industrial-automation professionals — has begun to cross the boundaries of fab labs and makerspaces to enter industry as a tool for design and prototyping, revolutionising development processes.
Arduino was not only able to enable an entire generation of creatives, artists, designers and anyone with no background in electronics or computing to design electronics and produce interactive products, but also allowed companies to reduce the development phase of an idea and the realisation of a first prototype to a matter of hours rather than months.
The audience of Arduino users today is much broader, and the new professional user base, unlike the more strictly maker segment, has advanced skills in programming and firmware-development tools. In the long run, an excessively simplified environment such as the traditional Processing-based IDE we have been used to for over 15 years cannot satisfy ICT and Digital-Electronics professionals.
This is why we were not surprised by the announcement made during the last Maker Faire of Rome of the launch of the new IDE PRO — a totally redesigned environment that, while retaining the option to switch to the traditional interface mode, offers a new interaction mode, more in line with the habits of professional programmers, based on the Open Source IDE Eclipse Theia.
At the time of writing, the new IDE PRO is still in alpha version — therefore not recommended for actual use — and downloadable from the GitHub repository at this link.
A further signal of the direction in which Arduino is heading came in these days, with the presentation at CES 2020 in Las Vegas of the new Portenta H7 board. The name, recalling the Latin term portentum — monster — speaks for itself.
The Portenta H7 is equipped with a Dual Core consisting of a Cortex M7 processor at 480 MHz and a Cortex M4 processor at 240 MHz, communicating via RPC.
The new board will be a native implementation of ARM’s Mbed IoT platform, will be able to host classic Arduino sketches on top of the ARM Mbed OS system, microPython and JavaScript interpreters, and the TensorFlow Lite suite for developing Artificial Intelligence applications.
Chirale had foreseen this trend for some time, and our training offer was already oriented towards the new paradigms that see the integration of IoT platforms with Machine Learning technologies.
Our courses, starting from the basic level ones, take this scenario into account, and we are among the first in Italy to offer training that allows you to immediately experiment with the new scenarios that will soon also have a significant impact on the labour market.
Arduino is increasingly confirmed as the ideal tool for entering the world of the new intelligent machines from scratch.