New LoRa Shield Now Compatible with Arduino Portenta H7

At the start of the last year Arduino made an announcement regarding the Portenta Board. This year they have announced the launch of a embedded Vision Shield with LoRa which is compatible with the Portenta H7. 

Designed specifically for edgeML applications, the LoRa option of the Portenta Vision Shield also enables communication with the LoRa and LoRaWAN protocols for low-power, long distance communications. The shield is said to be the ideal option for the powerful Portenta H7. With the LoRa capabilites added, on-device machine learning is made possible with this shield and hence enhancing the IoT applications.

Another version of the same shield uses Ethernet instead of LoRa Protocol. With the Ethernet version, the possibilities of its use are endless. Apart from the protocol difference, the rest of the specifications are the same.

Specifications:

• Storage – MicroSD card socket
• Camera – Himax HM-01B0 camera module with 324 x 324 active pixel resolution with support for QVGA
• Image sensor – High sensitivity 3.6μ BrightSense pixel technology
• Microphone – 2x MP34DT05 omnidirectional microphones
• Connectivity
  • Ethernet version- 10/100M Ethernet RJ45 jack
  • LoRa version – Same Murata CMWX1ZZABZ LoRa module as found on Portenta H7  baseboard

Arduino has also announced a collaboration with OpenMV IDE to aide the users learn MicroPython. The statement read, "Arduino has teamed up with OpenMV to offer you a free license to the OpenMV IDE, an easy way into computer vision using MicroPython as a programming paradigm. Download the OpenMV for Arduino Editor from our professional tutorials site and browse through the examples we have prepared for you inside the OpenMV IDE. Companies across the whole world are already building their commercial products based on this simple-yet-powerful approach to detect, filter, and classify images, QR codes, and others."

The Vision Shield is now available for sale on the Arduino site.