Particle.io (formerly Spark) — First Plug n Play, Connected Single Board Computers

Single Board Computer market keeps growing but there was something missing. The thing is, if you want to make a project actually useful, it has to be connected somehow. And when you decide to start a connected hardware project yourself, you eventually come across a problem. Either connecting your hardware with any service is a real pain in your ass or does not come cheap.

Let’s write down some of your choices:

You can connect your SBC with Ethernet Plug:

If you bought a small famous SBC like Arduino UNO R3, you need to buy an add-on circuit called Ethernet Shield. By the way, most of the Shields have more expensive price tags from Arduino UNO R3. For the sake of the DIY spirit, you decided to spend at least one more Arduino UNO R3 price for your connection desire or you have already spent enough money to your SBC and bought a BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi, then it may have an ethernet port.

Dont get too excited. You still need to learn several connection protocols or import a truckload of programming library you don’t really now what they are doing. Even if you accomplished that connecting with popular web API’s and parsing a JSON response is not a piece of cake in the low level computing world.

You can connect your SBC wirelessly with WiFi or 3G:

Almost none of your possible SBC choices have a WiFi radio to connect your network out of the box. And wifi shields or dongles are at least as twice as expensive from ethernet shields.

Those who have projects demanding high mobility features, 3G is the tech you are looking for, get ready to triple your setup budget and monthly 3G data connection charges.

Let me introduce you the Particle.io!

Particle is an Internet of Things company and they just released their new Single Board Computer product line, Photon and Electron. Both are smaller than a matchbox and they both are capable of internet connection out of the box with a genuine plug n play experience. Photon has a WiFi card, Electron has 3G.

Their new product line is not only cute but also, with these price tags (19$ for Photon and 39$ for Electron) they are absolutely worth to try. Though Particle’s main strength is not price tags their SDK. With Particle products, you can develop your IOT project on a mobile platform without any connection problems. Particle Cloud and SDK deals with your connectivity problems perfectly. This time rather than making a led blink experiment from USB port of your computer or a button on your breadboard, you will find your self-making same experiment from your iPhone over the internet. You can completely focus on your idea. With this cloud capabilities, I am aware of that they are not providing the fasted or lightest option. But these are all prototyping hardware so I think the main value is rapid prototyping here, so give them a try.

PS: if you want to build a real product and sell it, Particle is the first SBC manufacturer which has a real production scaling plan check it out from particle.io/scale.

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