Last year saw the Portenta released with the concept of a carrier board following shortly afterwards . . . then the carrier fell by the wayside and instead came the vision shield, which although interesting, is useful to a smaller subset of the Portenta community than a more general carrier board in my opinion.
There have been no major updates as to what support is coming next by the Arduino folks, from a software point of view e.g. a proper implementation of variable sharing across the two cores; how to prioritize interrupt handling etc, or from the point of view of breakout boards or other peripheral hardware. We further learnt that the board footprints are going to remain proprietary and not open source, so consumer led tinkering seems to be restricted for now; there has neither been any progress reports from consumers on this forum who have tried making a carrier (what works, what doesn't, what projects they used it for, what could be better).
The possible application directions of the Portenta are quite extensive, however there does not seem to be a decisive push to go in any of them. Are there any comments from anyone, even anecdotal news, on what is coming next? I put my Portenta in a drawer around November of last year after wishing to use it in a CNC project utilizing sensor measurements for feedback. I moved on to other projects in the hope that the Portenta concept would mature over the coming months and I could then open that drawer again.
This forum is eerily quiet, which does not bode well for my plans with the Portenta.
I don't have answers for your questions, but as for the software side of things I can recommend that any interested parties "Watch" this repository:
This is where the majority of the firmware development work for the Portenta H7 is happening and where users are reporting bugs and making feature requests related to that code. I frequently learn new things via the notifications I get from that repository.
I'm also kinda curious about the direction Arduino is taking with their public API for general use in Arduino sketches.
For example, here's Portenta's TestSDCARD example.
#include "SDMMCBlockDevice.h"
#include "FATFileSystem.h"
SDMMCBlockDevice block_device;
mbed::FATFileSystem fs("fs");
void setup() {
// put your setup code here, to run once:
delay(2000);
int err = fs.mount(&block_device);
if (err) {
// Reformat if we can't mount the filesystem
// this should only happen on the first boot
printf("No filesystem found, formatting... ");
fflush(stdout);
err = fs.reformat(&block_device);
}
DIR *dir;
struct dirent *ent;
printf("try to open dir\n");
if ((dir = opendir("/fs")) != NULL) {
/* print all the files and directories within directory */
while ((ent = readdir (dir)) != NULL) {
printf ("%s\n", ent->d_name);
}
closedir (dir);
} else {
/* could not open directory */
printf ("error\n");
}
}
void loop() {
// put your main code here, to run repeatedly:
}
Other than the familiar setup() and loop(), the rest of this looks almost nothing like normal Arduino APIs. There's use of printf() rather than Serial.print, C++ namespace used for library instance, access to SD card using C-library style API rather than the traditional Arduino Stream class.
Is this the Arduino API future? Or just a bunch of non-Arduino code that somehow found its way into a published example? (other Portenta examples are similar....)
Hi Paul, you're right. That example is not very Arduinish, and definitely needs to be adapted to the Arduino API.
We would like to start an open discussion about improvements and extensions to the Arduino API soon, since our goal is to have a continuous evolution of it to make it more robust and comprehensive. Keep in touch!
Hi , from what i read on the pro site of arduino these new board are meant for production ready for commercial product since the other arduino board lack of industrial certification...maybe except the mkr board but i was not able to find any certification...
we are developing with mkrgsm1400 but 3G will be shutdown on february 2021 and there is no any news on a new board with 4G...i was looking at the development of the portenta hardware but there are no choice of shield and also the pro IDE is in the very very early stage and no new version since august 2020...in my opinion the pace is not very good and i suspect we have to wait too many months before the pro family became like the original family...with the doubt that they are testing the interest for further development...
tradexsrl:
the pro IDE is in the very very early stage
This is true, but note that you also have the option of using Arduino CLI or the standard Arduino IDE, so Arduino Pro IDE is not essential to using Portenta.
tradexsrl:
no new version since august 2020.
The last release of Arduino Pro IDE was only 6 weeks ago:
Because the arduino/arduino-pro-ide repository is only used as an issue tracker and a place to publish releases, and thus doesn't have an active commit history, it's easy to get the impression that the Arduino Pro IDE isn't under active development. However, it is under very active development (with the exception of the developers' holiday vacations of course). You can get some idea about the development progress from checking the changelog provided with the releases, which is a list of the commit messages.