Famous embedded board developer Arduino has announced Arduino Portenta Machine Control, which adds up to its Pro lineup of products. According to Arduino, it’s a fully-centralized, low-power, industrial control unit able to drive equipment and machinery. The board comes with an Arduino Portenta H7 featuring an STM32H747XI at its heart. With a surplus amount of I/O ports, the Arduino Portenta Machine Control is perfect as a powerful brain for your standalone industrial machinery.
We recently saw the Arduino Edge Control, a powerful attachment for outdoor applications, particularly agriculture. Arduino Portenta Machine Control is somewhat in the same domain but is much more powerful and is focused more on Industrial applications. One thing to notice here is that Arduino Pro products are targeting the industrial sectors and are coming out to be pretty good. This is due to the ease with which the products can be used and the huge support of the Arduino community.
Key highlights of Arduino Portenta Machine Control
The Portenta H7 on the Arduino Portenta Machine Control features an STM32H747XI MCU. The STM chip leverages Arm Cortex-M7 + Cortex M4 32 bit RISC cores. These are low-power processors that offer high performance with a clock speed of up to 240 MHz. “The Portenta Machine Control allows companies to enable new business-as-a-service models by monitoring customer usage of equipment for predictive maintenance and providing valuable production data.” says the Arduino Team.
Portenta Machine Control has a wide range of I/O pins, with many special functionalities. These pins unlock the ability to connect multiple external human interfaces. So, you can connect displays, touch panels, keyboards, joysticks, and mice to enable on-site reconfiguration of state machines and direct manipulation of processes. With the IoT capabilities of the board, you can collect real-time data from your machinery and perform remote control, even from the cloud.
A look into its technical specifications
There are two dedicated channels for encoder readings and three analog inputs for PT100/PT1000/J/K temperature probes. In fact, all the 24V digital I/O are non-galvanic isolated pins with short circuit protection. The communications side offers impressive compatibility with industrial protocols like CAN and RS485. These protocols have been a standard for industrial devices for a long time due to their robustness and reliability. RS-485 is widely used for controller to disk communications and utilizes minimal wiring. CAN protocol was initially made for automotive. Due to several benefits which include multi-master communication, it is now is widely adapted for industrial purposes. Additionally, there’s Wi-Fi and BLE for the wireless part and an Ethernet port if you prefer wired connections.
The housing of the board is made to support a DIN rail, making the mounting hassle-free. There are push-in terminals for each I/O for fast and robust connections. The board comes with a form factor of 170x90x50mm and weighs 186g in total. The board is also CE, FCC and RoHS certified.
Coming to the software part, like all the other Arduino products, the Arduino Portenta Machine Control is fully compatible with Arduino IDE. In addition to that, you can even configure it through Arduino’s cloud-based development tools. With such powerful tools at your disposal, the board provides a smooth entry for the new users in this field.
Arduino Portenta Machine Control currently retails for $335 on the Arduino store. You can refer to the product page to learn more about the board.
The product page is the source of all the images and technical specifications used.
Harsh Chaudhary is an engineering student currently pursuing Electrical Engineering. He’s a robotics and tech enthusiast and likes to write about stuff related to IoT and embedded systems. His vision is to use Robotics to make the life of humans easier.
