As part of Arduino’s efforts to play a bigger role in Industry 4.0, Arduino PRO expanded its Portenta portfolio with the launch of the Portenta Machine Control (PMC), a low-power industrial control unit that adds industrial IoT capabilities to standalone machinery. The unit enables the collection of real-time data from the factory floor and supports the remote control of equipment, including from the cloud. It allows users to monitor anything from vibrations to spare parts availability as well as automate processes that optimize workflow, productivity and quality.
The computing power also makes the PMC suited for a range of predictive maintenance and artificial intelligence (AI) use cases. At the heart of the unit, housed in a 170 × 90 × 50 footprint, is an Arduino Portenta H7 microcontroller board with STMicroelectronics’ STM32H747XI dual-core Cortex-M7+M4 32-bit low-power Arm microcontroller.
Other features of the industrial control unit include 16 MB on-board flash memory and 8 MB SRAM. It also offers several connectivity options – Ethernet, USB, programming port, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Low Energy – and communications protocols, including CAN BUS and programmable serial port 232/422/485. The operating temperature range is -40° C to +85° C.
The modular and customizable PMC can be programmed using the Arduino framework or other embedded development platforms. It can be used to retrofit or upgrade existing machines or to develop new products with embedded sensors and actuators, enabling standard platforms across different equipment models.
The Portenta Machine Control is priced at €279/US$335.
Advertisement
