Planet Arduino

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Arduino Portenta Breakout, designed for developing hardware projects, testing, and debugging on Portenta family boards.

The Portenta Breakout exploits all the capabilities of the input and outputs, making all high density connectors’ signals individually accessible.

The Portenta Breakout reduces development time for industrial-grade solution automation based on the Portenta line. Designed to help the hardware engineers and makers who want to develop a proprietary device for Portenta family boards or interfacing external devices to the Portenta family boards (e.g. the Portenta H7). It is now quick and easy to connect and test external hardware components and devices in the lab using all the high density connectors’ signals of the Portenta individually.

Rapid development for machine vision

Connectivity to the OpenMV Global Shutter Camera is provided on the Portenta Breakout, allowing for rapid development of machine vision applications alongside the Portenta family.

Test external hardware and devices

The Arduino Portenta Breakout enables easy debugging through the JTAG connector and allows for inspection of the bus lines through the breakout pins. In addition to the breakout pins, the Portenta Breakout features Ethernet, USB and SD sockets, a coin cell, a power button, an external power supply, an OpenMV camera socket, and configurable boot selection modes.

Features include:

• Power ON button
• Boot mode DIP switch
• Connectors
  • USBA
  • RJ45 GBit Ethernet
  • MicroSD card
  • OpenMV shutter module
  • MIPI 20T JTAG with trace capability
• Power
  • CR2032 RTC lithium battery backup
  • External power terminal block
• I/O
  • Break out all Portenta high density connector signals
  • Male/female HD connectors for interposing breakout between Portenta and shield to debug signals

Beyond use in the development lab, the Portenta Breakout can act as a first point of entry for educating technicians in industrial-grade control and embedded systems.

The new Portenta Breakout is now available on the Arduino Store.

If you’ve been hanging around microcontrollers and electronics for a while, you’re surely familiar with the concept of the breakout board. Instead of straining to connect wires and components to ever-shrinking ICs and MCUs, a breakout board makes it easier to interface with the device by essentially making it bigger. The Arduino itself, arguably, is a breakout board of sorts. It takes the ATmega chip, adds the hardware necessary to get it talking to a computer over USB, and brings all the GPIO pins out with easy to manage header pins.

But what if you wanted an even bigger breakout board for the ATmega? Something that really had some leg room. Well, say no more, as [Nick Poole] has you covered with his insane RedBoard Pro Micro-ATX. Combining an ATmega32u4 microcontroller with standard desktop PC hardware is just as ridiculous as you’d hope, but surprisingly does offer a couple tangible benefits.

The RedBoard is a fully compliant micro-ATX board, and will fit in pretty much any PC case you may have laying around in the junk pile. Everything from the stand-off placement to the alignment of the expansion card slots have been designed so it can drop right into the case of your choice.

That’s right, expansion slots. It’s not using PCI, but it does have a variation of the standard Arduino “shield” concept using 28 pin edge connectors. There’s a rear I/O panel with a USB port and ISP header, and you can even add water cooling if you really want (the board supports standard LGA 1151 socket cooling accessories).

While blowing an Arduino up to ATX size isn’t exactly practical, the RedBoard is not without legitimate advantages. Specifically, the vast amount of free space on the PCB allowed [Nick] to add 2Mbits of storage. There was even some consideration to making removable banks of “RAM” with EEPROM chips, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. The RedBoard also supports standard ATX power supplies, which will give you plenty of juice for add-on hardware that may be populating the expansion slots.

With as cheap and plentiful as the miniITX and microATX cases are, it’s no surprise people seem intent on cramming hardware into them. We’ve covered a number of attempts to drag other pieces of hardware kicking and screaming into that ubiquitous beige-box form factor.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, computer hacks, Microcontrollers