Porting Betaflight to the Arduino Portenta H7 Board — Part 1
Arduino Australia has generously provided us with an early version of their latest board, the Portenta H7. This is a professional bit of kit with some serious specs (see below). Our mission is to port the BetaFlight firmware across to the Portenta and design the hardware required to produce a drone suitable for school incursions and STEM training.
To prepare for this challenge, we created an earlier drone prototype based on a commercially available flight controller using the STM32 F7 microprocessor. Click on the hyperlink to read Part 1 in this series. This highlighted a few deficiencies in our design which will be rectified in the Magpie DS2.
Specifications
The Portenta H7’s main processor is the dual core STM32H747 which has a Cortex® M7 running at 480 MHz and a Cortex® M4 running at 240 MHz. The two cores can communicatem with each other and with all the peripherals on the board. This is a step up from the STM32 F7 we previously used. The pertinent Portenta specifications are:
