Teensy 4.0 vs PORTENTA H7

I do believe there's a strong need for this. It's definitely not where Teensy is focused, very much on commercial temperature range, keeping costs low (no big SDRAM chip), and focusing on makers.

Hello Everyone.

I just wanted to add my '50 cents' here, looking at the expansion Arduino had in the last decade as an ecosystem but also as a company I think that is the right move to do .
The addition of a separate commercial/industry product-line is a good thing, as long as stuff developed within the pro segment will flow into Maker/OSS products .It does in
every other company I think of - so I am pretty sure this wont be any different.

Secondly - I think that this will shake the perception within big name corporations - there are a lot HR dinosaurs there assuming Arduino = Toy - so the Pro line might be a great
thing that will change this very biased view...
 
Seems unlikely for both cores to share a peripheral.
Depends on what one defines as periphal - You mention the Clocks (don't know if they are official called "periphal" )- i guess the PLLs and PFDs (the whole clock domain) are shared?
The MPU is not shared. Each CPU core has its own MPU. Here's the block diagram from NXP's public "fact sheet".

View attachment 18978
Yes I assumed that. Makes more sense, too :) But this does not mean they can not restrict the access (they can do it for their "own" core, then).


So far, I really haven't done much on this.
Yeah, I assumed so :) It's not the time.

Getting Teensy 4.1 into production (or fully ready before all the parts arrive) is my top priority right now.
No betatests?

I am going to collaborate with Arduino on this. We've already exchanged a few emails. I do believe everyone benefits if we create compatible APIs.
That would be great. Let's see how that turns out!

It's definitely not where Teensy is focused, very much on commercial temperature range, keeping costs low (no big SDRAM chip), and focusing on makers.
It confused me a bit that there are official statements and explanations in a forum that is not industry-related.
I have no problem with that (on the contrary! - it is interesting and thanks for the insights )
And re: open source:I think we all know how difficult it was in the past to contribute
 
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Portenta H7 does have 2.54mm spaced pins on the outside edge. But only so many can fit, because they are so large.

Teensy is the same way. We try to put as many of those pins on the outside edge as possible, but it is never enough for everyone. To get more signals without smaller pitch, the PCB would need to become very long.

I obviously have seen them and that would make it like a Teensy 3.2/4.0. I loved the long 3.5/3.6 Teensy due to the number of workable pins! One way you could improve it is by using two rows of 2.56 mm pins, like the robotdyn mega pro (2560). you marginally increase the size of the board, you can keep it compatible with previous versions (you add rows on the outside). I like it much better than these 0.4 mm microscopic connectors.
 
I'm wondering when the 64-bit ARM boards will percolate down to the embedded space.

When you need a MMU, AND more than 4 GB of addressable space, that will happen.
Interestingly, the Pi uses 64-bit kernel but 32-bit user space, by default, although now that they have a 4 GB version, people are working on 64-bit user space too I think.

Regarding Portenta: If you want to blow $99 on a microcontroller that can do graphics and machine learning and USB C, you might as well use a Jetson Nano. It has more RAM, more storage, faster cores, more of them, and a very high quality graphics and GPU computing set of libraries. Nobody in the embedded space can touch NVIDIA for that level of support.

Regarding all the pins: I hoped a year ago for a high-density "mezzanine" connector on the underside of the Teensy 4, and I'm still hoping. Someone could make a break-out board that surface solder just the connector on something that runs out a bunch of more pins, for those who don't want to use the skillet method, the toaster oven reflow method, the China method, or the MacroFab method of getting their surface mount soldering done.

Another high-density connector that's easy to work with is the SO-DIMM connector -- tons of parts available. Both Raspberry Pi and NVIDIA Jetson use these for their small modules. However, this isn't as compatible with a basic DIP 100 mil form factor for the base layout. At a minimum, you'd have to hide another row of pins on the breadboard, which would be unfortunate.
 
Why would you spend €90 on this Arduino H7 when you can get the STM32H747I Discovery board with 4" LCD touchscreen !

https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32h747i-disco.html

I don't understand why anyone would pay Arduino prices for anything; Which is not to downplay the role the brand has had in advancing the interest in and accessibility to the world of microcontrollers. Arduino just isn't priced competitively with it's competition, imho.
 
I really like what Black Mesa Labs did with the S7Mini/TE0890 FPGA board. It has 0.1"/2.54mm spaced primary pins and then a second set of 80 pins interleaved at 0.05"/1.27mm spacing. So you can decide how many pins you really need and then pick your connector for whatever board you are putting it onto. I thought this was a really clever approach to making a high pincount device much more hobbyist friendly without strangling the accessible pin counts or immediately forcing you to fine pitch connectors.

Pic here: https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en...e-with-Xilinx-Spartan-7-7S25-64-MBit-HyperRAM

I obviously have seen them and that would make it like a Teensy 3.2/4.0. I loved the long 3.5/3.6 Teensy due to the number of workable pins! One way you could improve it is by using two rows of 2.56 mm pins, like the robotdyn mega pro (2560). you marginally increase the size of the board, you can keep it compatible with previous versions (you add rows on the outside). I like it much better than these 0.4 mm microscopic connectors.
 
They also said at the time they were going to support MicroPython, but not Adafruit's CircuitPython. I see MicroPython is mentioned on the page. Been looking forward to seeing where this goes and to (maybe) follow their lead on Python. Or maybe go with Adafruit's stuff?
I just got a Portenta H7 with the Vision/Lora shield. I even got the breakout board. I have Micropython loaded on it and I can access the REPL. However, it does not seem to be running my main.py script. I might be missing a configuration step so am trying to find out more about it. It does work great with Arduino with both cores running. I am not sure their Micropython support is what it should be right now, and that is the main reason I got it. Only time will tell whether I have made a bad investment or not. At least the Arduino support is good!

As with any board, how useful it will be really depends on how much work they put into the software side. I'm *really* curious to see what they do for the core library and various Arduino libs. Maybe they'll fork STM32's core? Or maybe they'll build on top of mbed & cmsis? Seems unlikely they'll hand-craft the software from scratch, but who knows?
MBED does not currently list it as a compatible board at this time.

8-Dale
 
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