The Portenta H7 is a powerful development board from Arduino with both a Cortex-M7 microcontroller and a Cortex-M4 microcontroller, a BLE/WiFi radio, and an extension slot to connect the Portenta vision shield - which adds a camera and dual microphones. At the moment the Portenta H7 is partially supported by Edge Impulse, letting you collect data from the camera, build computer vision models, and deploy trained machine learning models back to the development board. The Portenta H7 and the vision shield are available directly from Arduino for ~$150 in total.
There are two versions of the vision shield: one that has an Ethernet connection and one with a LoRa radio. Both of these can be used with Edge Impulse.
The Edge Impulse firmware for this development board is open source and hosted on GitHub: edgeimpulse/firmware-arduino-portenta-h7.
To set this device up in Edge Impulse, you will need to install the following software:
Here's an instruction video for Windows.
The Arduino website has instructions for macOS and Linux.
On Linux:
GNU Screen: install for example via sudo apt install screen.
Problems installing the CLI?
See the Installation and troubleshooting guide.
With all the software in place it's time to connect the development board to Edge Impulse.
Using the vision shield using two edge connectors on the back Portenta H7.
Use a USB-C cable to connect the development board to your computer. Then, double-tap the RESET button to put the device into bootloader mode. You should see the green LED on the front pulsating.
The development board does not come with the right firmware yet. To update the firmware:
Download the latest Edge Impulse firmware, and unzip the file.
Double press on the RESET button on your board to put it in the bootloader mode.
Open the flash script for your operating system (flash_windows.bat, flash_mac.command or flash_linux.sh) to flash the firmware.
Wait until flashing is complete, and press the RESET button once to launch the new firmware.
From a command prompt or terminal, run:
This will start a wizard which will ask you to log in, and choose an Edge Impulse project. If you want to switch projects run the command with --clean.
Alternatively, recent versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge can collect data directly from your development board, without the need for the Edge Impulse CLI. See this blog post for more information.
That's all! Your device is now connected to Edge Impulse. To verify this, go to your Edge Impulse project, and click Devices. The device will be listed here.
With everything set up you can now build your first machine learning model with these tutorials:
Looking to connect different sensors? The Data forwarder lets you easily send data from any sensor into Edge Impulse.
Download your custom firmware from the Deployment tab in the Studio and install the firmware with the same method as in the "Update the firmware" section and run the edge-impulse-run-impulse command:
Note that it may take up to 10 minutes to compile the firmware for the Arduino Portenta H7
Use the Running your impulse locally: On your Arduino tutorial and select one of the portenta examples:
For an end-to-end example that classifies data and then sends the result over LoRaWAN. Please see the example-portenta-lorawan example.
If you come across this issue:
You probably forgot to double press the RESET button before running the flash script.
