Arduino Pro Q&A

By Harvey Wilson   |   September 16, 2024   |   Provided By Avnet Silica

Below, we answer key questions about the Arduino Pro series, highlighting its role in industrial applications, its capabilities, cloud integration, and the ease of developing machine learning models on the edge. It also addresses the physical integration of Arduino products, their interoperability with other vendors, and the cost-effectiveness of Arduino-based solutions compared to traditional chip-down approaches.

We also preview new products planned for the Arduino Pro range, and their potential in enhancing smart city, building, remote maintenance, and fleet management applications.

What is Arduino?

Arduino’s mission is to democratise electronics, by designing, manufacturing, and supporting a range of electronic devices and software that make it easy for people to access advanced technologies that interact with the physical world.

Arduino products can be found at the heart of thousands of projects worldwide. A global community of over 30 million users has contributed to this open-source platform, making a wealth of knowledge available to developers. An estimated 2 out of 5 engineers have Arduino skills and over 83 million Arduino projects have been deployed globally.

Millions of users and thousands of companies use Arduino as an innovation platform.

Arduino has drawn on this experience in frictionless design to enable enterprises to quickly and securely connect remote sensors to business logic within one simple IoT application development platform - Arduino Pro.

Within Arduino Pro, you'll also find powerful boards for industrial control, robotics and on-device AI.

Are Arduino Pro products suitable for industrial applications?

The Arduino Pro product family, launched in 2020, comprises a range of industrial grade products, including the Portenta range of System on Modules (SOMs) and the Nicla sensor boards, along with two boards specifically designed for industrial automation applications and a range of connectivity boards.

The Portenta SOMs are based on powerful multicore processors, with a range of connectivity options, and the Nicla boards, rated for temperatures between -40 degrees and +85 degrees Celsius, integrate multiple sensor types. The end-to-end portfolio includes embedded sensing and edge gateways, supporting machine learning and AI on the edge, remote monitoring, and real-time alarms and notifications. The small form factor low power boards support battery-powered solutions. Over 2,000 enterprise companies are currently using Arduino Pro products.

How easy is it to integrate an Arduino solution with the Cloud?

Arduino offers a myriad of cloud connectivity options. The Arduino Cloud is used by over 50,000 individuals, schools, and businesses, facilitating the simple and rapid creation of IoT solutions. Users can choose from a wide range of Arduino or ESP-boards or select a third-party device which supports Python, MicroPython, JavaScript, or Node-RED.

Arduino Cloud solutions are tailored according to user type, with the enterprise plan offering Secure OTA updates, Fleet Management, Data Retention, Real-time alerts and Role-based access control. The all-in-one Arduino Cloud solution empowers users to create from any location, control their devices with innovative dashboards, and easily share their projects.

Arduino Pro also supports other Cloud Service Providers such as AWS, Azure, and Avnet Silica’s own IoTConnect→ platform.

Can I develop edge computing solutions running ML models with Arduino Pro?

Yes, you can! Arduino Pro is ideally suited to Edge processing, with the Portenta H7 and X8 processors both equipped with sufficient processing power to support sophisticated ML models. The H7 comes with the STM32H747XI dual Cortex®-M7+M4 32bit low power Arm® MCU, and the X8 combines two microprocessors — the NXP® i.MX 8M Mini MPU (Linux) and the STM32H747XI dual Cortex®-M7+M4 32bit low power ARM® MCU — and comes with the Linux operating system pre-installed.

Both boards are equipped with dual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio modules facilitating connectivity to the cloud. The Nicla Sense ME and Nicla Vision sensor boards also include powerful microprocessors, allowing ML routines to be directly hosted on them and both come with connectivity options enabling tools such as Edge Impulse to interact with them.

How does Arduino Pro simplify development?

The flexibility, power, and functionality of the Arduino Pro product family offers a solution to address most smart device use cases. These boards enable the developer to quickly integrate a hardware solution without having to engage multiple resources and incur lengthy development cycles. Pre-certified communications modules and built in security devices reduce the need for specialist security skills and simplify certification and approval processes. 

The open-source Arduino Interactive Development Environment (IDE) contains a rich set of software libraries, developed over the years by the extensive Arduino user community. This software is freely available for inspection, modification, and adoption by the developer, significantly reducing the software development burden. In addition, easy integration with web services such as Arduino Cloud, AWS, and Azure give access to tools which facilitate the creation of AI and ML models.

Finally, Arduino offers a range of Pro Kits that contain reference designs, tutorials and guides to help users get started with several of the more common application types.

How easy is it to physically integrate Arduino Pro products into my solution?

The small physical size of the Arduino Pro boards facilitates their integration into customer end solutions. The Nicla Vision board, for example, has dimensions of 22.86 mm x 22.86 mm with a PCB thickness of 1mm, minimising its use of enclosure real estate. The low power consumption of the Arduino boards also removes the need for forced air cooling.

Is an Arduino Solution interoperable with other vendors?

The Arduino Pro stack includes a powerful Middleware platform which abstracts the developer from the underlying hardware. This platform removes the need for the developer to create underlying hardware interfaces and drivers, OS and security APIs, application code, etc. This not only helps to accelerate the development process, but it also brings a level of portability to the solution. If the underlying SOM board needs to be changed for example from one with an NXP processor to a Renesas-based board, the process of adapting the code is significantly simplified, taking hours (rather than days or weeks). This feature brings a level of futureproofing to the solution, enabling hardware changes to be made in support of additional features, and de-risks a solution by preventing vendor lock-in.

How can an Arduino-based solution be more cost-effective than a chip-down approach?

A typical chip-down development process can take up to three years before the product generates revenue, incurring significant non-recurring engineering (NRE), costs along the way. For products with high volumes and long life cycles, this may be the most cost-effective approach, but Arduino offers a number of advantages, both in the early stages of development and also for low to medium volume production runs. A survey of Arduino customer projects has found that products based on the Arduino ecosystem can generate revenue within one year. This effectively brings two additional years of revenue to the customer, more than compensating for the higher Bill-of-Material (BoM) costs of a pre-integrated hardware solution.

If the product goes on to have a longer life cycle and / or higher volumes, the customer can benefit from the Arduino open architecture to ‘depopulate’ the Arduino solution for implementation with a chip down approach.

Are any new products planned for the Arduino Pro range?

Following the success of the Arduino Pro family, Arduino are launching a number of new products during 2024.

The Arduino Pro 4G module, released in the widely adopted mini PCIe form factor, offers reliable 4G connectivity as well as backward compatibility with 2G and 3G networks. The Pro 4G module can be combined with multiple Portenta boards, either via the Portenta Max Carrier, or the newly released Portenta Mid Carrier, for the development of a wide spectrum of smart city / building, remote maintenance, and fleet management applications.

Recognising the growing importance of the Matter protocol in the IoT, the new Nano Matter board, based on the powerful MGM204S from Silicon Labs enables the developer to quickly and easily start interacting with any Matter-compatible device.

The newly launched Opta Expansion modules enable customers to cost-effectively scale up their PLC I/O count. Each module brings an additional 16 I/O ports and each Opta PLC can support up to 4 to 5 expansion modules, giving a max of 88 I/O ports.

See Arduino Pro Overview

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Harvey Wilson

Harvey Wilson is a Systems Engineer Professional (Smart Industry) for Avnet Silica in the EMEA regio...

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