Arduino Builds a Bridge to the Raspberry Pi Ecosystem with Its New Portenta Hat Carrier Board

Arduino has announced a new expansion board, designed to make it easier to take advantage of the capabilities of its Portenta X8, Portenta H7, or Portenta C33 system-on-modules — by breaking their features out into easily-accessible pin headers, including one compatible with Raspberry Pi Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) accessories.

"Portenta Hat Carrier provides a unique bridge between the Arduino and Raspberry Pi ecosystems, offering professionals a modular platform for prototyping to full-fledged industrial applications," claims Arduino co-founder, chair, and chief marketing officer Massimo Banzi of his company's latest launch. "We are excited to offer a product that answers our customers’ requests and supports an ecosystem we admire."

The Portenta Hat Carrier is designed to compatible with the company's Portenta X8, Portenta H7, and Portenta C33 boards, increasing the footprint in order to make room for microSD storage expansion, USB connectivity, a MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) port, and a wired Ethernet port — plus a 40-pin header designed for compatibility with the growing Raspberry Pi HAT ecosystem.

Other features of the carrier board include a dedicated fan connector with pulse-width modulation (PWM) speed control, eight additional analog input/output pins not available on an unexpanded Portenta board on a 16-pin "analog header", an onboard CAN bus transceiver, and dedicated JTAG pins for easier debugging.

Arduino is positioning the Portenta Hat Carrier as ideal for industrial automation projects, robotics, and — when paired with the company's Portenta X8 — Linux prototyping projects. The company also suggests the pairing as a platform for low-power machine at the edge, when coupled with a MIPI CSI camera module.

The Portenta Hat Carrier is now available to order from the Arduino store, priced at $45; you'll also need a Portenta board to drive it, starting at $64 for the Portenta C33.