Arduino strips video from Portenta H7 for lower cost industrial IoT

Called Portenta H7 Lite and part of the organisation’s ArduinoPro industrial IoT family, it sees it being used in AI applications and low-latency control projects “for everything from high-end industrial machinery to laboratory equipment and mission-critical devices”.

It can be used as an embedded microcontroller board, or as the main processor of an embedded computer, said Ardiono: “For example, use the Portenta Vision Shield to transform your H7 Lite into an industrial camera capable of performing real-time machine learning algorithms on live video feeds. As the H7 Lite can easily run processes created with TensorFlow™ Lite, you could have one of the cores computing a computer vision algorithm on the fly, while the other carries out low-level operations like controlling a motor or acting as a user interface.”

The Lite version keeps the dual-core STM32H747 (480MHz Cortex M7 plus 240MHz Cortex M4) where the “two cores communicate via a remote procedure call mechanism that allows calling functions on the other processor seamlessly,” said Arduino.

SDRAM options are between 8 and 64Mbyte and QSPI flash can span 2 to 128Mbyte. It can connect to an SD Card, but only through its expansion port – there is no on-board slot.

It keeps the 10/100 Ethernet option, but looses the Bluetooth 5 and b/g/n Wi-Fi.

Power can come through the USB-C connector or from a LiPo battery (charger built-in), with minimum (stand-by) drain of 2.95μA (back-up SRAM off, RTC/LSE on). The USB-C connector does not have the DisplayPort capability of the non-Lite Portenta 7.

Peripherals include timers, UART, ADC (up to 16bit up to 3.6Msample/s) and DAC (12bit 1MHz), and there is a MKR header for industrial MKR expansion shields.

Underneath are two 80 pin high density connectors.

Operation is over -40 to +85°C.

The Portenta H7 Lite product page is here