Arduino Pro Range Grows Bigger with the Easy-Use Portenta Breakout Carrier Board
Breaking out all the signals available on the Portenta module's HD connectors, the Portenta Breakout makes development and debug easy.
Arduino has launched another entry in its Arduino Pro range, which aims to bridge the gap between hobbyist and professional prototyping and production: the Arduino Portenta Breakout carrier for Portenta boards.
Arduino launched the Portenta family with the Portenta H7, unveiled at CES last year. Designed to appeal equally to Arduino's base of hobbyists and the new market of professionals looking to prototype or even produce new devices built on Arduino hardware. Since then, it's been updating the range with new add-ons: The Portenta Vision Shield gave the board tinyML capabilities for computer vision and voice at the edge, and its follow-up the Portenta Vision Shield LoRa included long-range low-power wireless connectivity.
Now, Arduino has launched the Arduino Portenta Breakout — and it does exactly what you'd expect: Break out as many features as possible in a single carrier board that takes the Portenta H7 or future Portenta boards at its center.
"[The] Arduino Portenta Breakout board is designed to help hardware engineers and makers to prototype and help test devices connections and capacity within the Portenta family boards (e.g. the Portenta H7)," the company explains. "It makes all high-density connectors' signals individually accessible, making it quick and easy to connect and test external hardware components and devices as normally needed during development in the lab."
The breakout carrier includes a physical power button, a DIP switch for selecting the board's boot mode, USB Type-A, gigabit Ethernet, microSD, MIPI 20T JTAG, OpenMV shutter module connectivity, a button-cell battery holder for the real-time clock, and all Portenta High Density connector pins broken out. The board also includes both male and female HD connectors, meaning it can operate sandwiched between a Portenta and its shield for ease of debugging.
The board is now available on the Arduino Store, priced at $45.99 excluding the cost of the Portenta to drive it.