The Arduino Portenta Vision Shield is a production-ready expansion for the powerful Arduino Portenta H7. It adds a low-power camera, two microphones, and connectivity; everything you need for the rapid development of edge ML applications.

The Portenta H7 simultaneously runs high-level code along with real-time tasks. The
H7’s main processor is a dual-core STM32H747 including a Cortex® M7 running at 480MHz and a Cortex® M4 running at 240MHz. The two cores communicate via a Remote Procedure Call mechanism that allows seamless calling of functions on the other processor.

Both processors share all the in-chip peripherals and can run:

• Arduino sketches on top of the Arm® Mbed™ OS
• Native Mbed™ applications

MicroPython / JavaScript (via an interpreter)

TensorFlow™ Lite

Moreover, the onboard wireless module allows the simultaneous management of WiFi and Bluetooth® connectivity on the Portenta H7.

The Portenta Vision Shield brings industry-rated vision and audio capabilities to your Portenta H7. This hardware add-on lets you run embedded computer vision applications, connect wirelessly or via Ethernet to the Arduino Cloud or your own infrastructure, and activate your system using sound detection.

The Vision shield comes with a 324×324 pixels camera module that contains an ultra low power image sensor designed for always-on vision devices and applications. The high sensitivity image sensors can capture gestures, ambient light, proximity sensing and object identification.

There’s a plethora of applications you can deploy with Portenta H7 and Portenta Vision Shield. The demonstration below shows how to implement an accurate digits recognition system using Edge Impulse. Digits recognition using computer vision is desirable in many application and market areas, such as grocery retail, manufacturing, utility metering, and administration.