Arduino Portenta C33 is the latest board from the Arduino Pro family which the company dubs a “high-performance, low-price” solution based on a 200 MHz Renesas RA6M5 Arm Cortex-M33 microcontroller and equipped with a ESP32-C3 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy module.
The new board provides a cost-effective alternative to the Portenta H7 and X8 boards, but still offers wireless connectivity, a secure element for industrial-grade security, and compatibility with Portenta, MKR, and Nicla components.
Portenta C33 specifications:
- Microcontroller – Renesas R7FA6M5BH2CBG Arm Cortex-M33 microcontroller @ up to 200 MHz with 512KB SRAM, 2MB Flash, Arm TrustZone, and Secure Crypto Engine 9
- Storage – 16 MB QSPI Flash
- Connectivity
- 10/100M Ethernet PHY
- ESP32-C3 WiFi and BLE module
- USB – 1x USB Type-C high-speed port with Power Delivery support
- I/Os via 2x 80-pin high-density connectors, Arduino MKR headers with castellated hole, and a 5-pin I2C connector
- Storage – SD Card
- Networking – 10/100M Ethernet
- Audio – I2S, SAI, PDM
- Serial – CAN Bus
- Analog – ADC
- Low-speed I/Os – SPI, I2C, GPIO
- Debugging – JTAG/SWD
- Security – NXP SE050C2 Secure Element
- Misc – Reset button
- Power Supply
- Via USB-C PD port
- Support for 3.7V/700mAH minimum LiPo single-cell battery
- Dimensions – 66.04 x 25.40 mm
- Temperature Range – -40°C to +85°C
The board can be programmed with the Arduino IDE or MicroPython, supports OTA firmware updates via services such as Arduino IoT cloud, and is expected to be used in cost-sensitive Industrial IoT or automation applications such as water, gas, or electricity meters, as well as for IoT prototyping, and use cases where Portenta H7/X8 boards are overpowered for the task at hand.
You’ll find further technical details and documentation on the Arduino Pro website. The Arduino Portenta C33 is now selling for $64 US/59 Euros on the Arduino store.
Update: This article was initially published on March 15, 2023 for the announcement at Embedded World 2023, and updated following availability of the board.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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$68 is lower cost ?!?
Yes, because the equivalent Portenta H7 Lite Connected now sells for $106.80.
Hm, curious why Arduino redesigned the board for Renesas usage instead of just get just releases H5 for basically the same feature set and I would also guess much closer to previous H7 from design point of view.
Probably because Renesas gave Arduino a 10 million dollar investment
https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-announces-investment-popular-open-source-company-arduino-access-huge-developer-community
The Arduino approach abstracts hardware, so picking the Renesas ARM MCU gave performance and price advantages without any changes to high-level coding. Portable code and libraries are the goal for platforms like this.