9 ms·
Introducing the Photon
- fchollet 12y agoI thought this was going to be about the Spark big data framework.
- scarythoughts 12y agoMe too, is this going to be a trademark dispute?
- aselzer 12y agoThis seems like a version of the Tessel[0] that isn't as overpriced[1]. [0] https://tessel.io/ https://tessel.io/ [1] https://shop.trycelery.com/page/tec https://shop.trycelery.com/page/tec
- MrBuddyCasino 12y agoWhy, it doesn't have a js interpreter or seem to use the same chips? Anyway, this looks like a nice middle ground between the cheap chinese 5$ ESPs that are kind of a pain in the arse to work with and the rather expensive Ardu-whatever. I'd love me some details though, couldn't find essentials like: * how much power does it use * expected throughput
- niutech 12y agoYou can program Spark using JavaScript too: https://github.com/spark/sparkjs https://github.com/spark/sparkjs
- bravo22 12y agoThose two don't seem to be the same thing. Tessel runs javascript on the micro so you can write your programs in js instead of C and compile it. What you've linked to is a js library for connecting to Spark cloud. Overall I think the Spark is much better bang for your buck.
- niutech 12y agoYou're right, although you can write your sketches using just JS: http://blog.spark.io/2014/09/29/blink-an-led-with-javascript/ http://blog.spark.io/2014/09/29/blink-an-led-with-javascript...
- jeiden 12y agoSo proud to be part of the team!
- Cyranix 12y agoCongrats on what seems like a very warm reception on HN! Can you provide a little more clarity on what the Photon Kit listed in the store consists of? The short description says "several sensors" and the description in the modal is even more vague with "a couple of extra surprises".
- BDub1 12y ago@Cyranix these "several sensors" are kind of bonus items so please trust that they will be a sweet surprise ;-)
- steffan 12y agoCongrats on the launch! Any idea whether there is or will be support for IPv6 on the Photon? Particularly for this sort of device, I think it is important to have that support.
- Florin_Andrei 12y agoGood job, y'all. Small, powerful, well connected, convenient to use. I think there's a chance you'll hit it out the ballpark. What you need now is shields, lots of shields, and libraries, lots of libraries. For Arduino there's a library for any sensor under the sun - you'll have to try and cover at least the most popular things out there. You know what's missing from the site? As a long-time Arduino user, I've learned the value of knowing in advance, very clearly, the number of digital and analog inputs and outputs on any device I plan to use. E.g., right now I'm wrestling an Arduino Mini, trying to fit all the digital pins I need for the OLED display, the tachometer sensors, the temperature and humidity sensor, and the various LEDs and control buses. It's probably gonna work, but it's a close race. I'm sure that information is available somewhere for your device, it just didn't jump at me when I looked at the site. Maybe you should make it a bit more prominent.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
- bjustin 12y agoI read the whole page and still am not sure what this is. Is it similar to an Arduino with on board WiFi?
- larrydag 12y agoThink of it as a postage-sized wifi router.
- Florin_Andrei 12y agoWith a cloud back-end, and controllable from any Internet-connected device.
- zsupalla 12y agoYep that's right! It's an Arduino-like microcontroller development board, but with built-in Wi-Fi and an open source cloud back-end
- bduerst 12y agoSo does it basically a wifi interface for REST commands and custom functions? (for devices)
- mcescalante 12y agoYep, that's pretty much exactly what it does, just tied into their ecosystem instead of being standalone/DIYish like an Arduino. You see people above comparing ElectricImp because it's very similar - simple way to get REST or simple net connectivity for a thing.
- bduerst 12y agoIs the device capable of pushing information out too? Or do I need to ping it at regular intervals to get an update or status change in something? It just seems like it would be great for push tasks, but what about when I want it to send notification or device info. (I've put together R Pis for exactly this type of thing, and having an entire OS for it is a little overkill)
- bradfa 12y agoIt's open source hardware for the example board design but not for the microcontroller and Broadcom wifi chip portion which seems to live within the square RF can which shows the "USI" logo. I believe the wifi chip used is the same as in the Electric Imp.
- brandoaire 12y agoIt's an Wiring-compatible dev board with built in Wi-Fi and free Cloud service.
- sparticvs 12y agoIf you're curious how the SmartConfig protocol works, see: http://depletionregion.blogspot.com/2013/10/cc3000-smart-config-transmitting-ssid.html http://depletionregion.blogspot.com/2013/10/cc3000-smart-con...
- elecengin 12y agoNote that SmartConfig is a TI-specific technology only available in the Spark Core (which is based off the popular CC3000 module). The Photon is based off a Broadcom chip and only appears to support Soft-AP provisioning (where the device presents itself as an access point that a phone/tablet/computer connects to in order to configure Wifi credentials.)
- sparticvs 12y agoMy apologies. Reading the documentation page confused me, figured the Photon was the only device by the group.
- jc4p 12y agoI'm excited to try out a Spark that isn't using the SmartConfig entirely because I'm unable to get it to connect to my WiFi network at work (running an enterprise WiFi setup using Cisco's APs)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- chillacy 12y agoPreordered. I bought a spark core and now I'm a huge fan. I have other arduinos, some teensy 3.0s, and avr chips, but the nice thing about having internet in embedded projects is: 1. No more xbee 2. Replaces other hardware components, for instance no need for an RTC when you can just get the time from the internet Their app for connecting to the network never worked for me but it had a serial fallback so that was fine.
- Florin_Andrei 12y agoJust curious, since I want to try it at some point - what's wrong with Xbee in this context?
- philihp 12y ago$20 is right at the impulse-buy level, too! Good job! Time to read about what I just preordered.
- fragmede 12y agoAs a wifi -> GPIO board, this seems to be similar to the Electric Imp, but better since it doesn't use their misguided SD card form-factor or their blink-up nonsense. They also have a web-based ide, as well as a downloadable ide. I've not tried either of those out, but the downloadable IDE (though no Linux support) means I can use the same version control tools (ie git) to manage it, which is a huge win over Electric Imp's web-only IDE. $20 for the Spark is an interesting price point as it's cheaper than most of the Arduino wifi shields, which you still need to connect to an Arduino. It's also the same price (in many places) as a USB wifi dongle, which you need, in order to connect up a Raspberry Pi. While this things is drastically less powerful than a Raspberry Pi, in projects where the Raspberry Pi is a simple Wifi -> GPIO board this seems perfect, especially since there's a already a mobile app. -- I wonder if the current title, 'Spark: Introducing the $19 Photon', is as it was submitted. But either way, it's a terrible title. What's a Photon, and why is it being $19 newsworthy?
- alexcroox 12y agoExactly this, I've been messing about with CC3300s and Ardiuno's in the past and it's a pain in the arse compared to this. Instant internet connectivity for a fraction of the price! We built an internet connected ping pong table at work with one! http://sidigital.co/blog/lab-notes-hacking-our-ping-pong-table http://sidigital.co/blog/lab-notes-hacking-our-ping-pong-tab...
- pmorici 12y ago"misguided SD card form-factor" The SD card is not the only form factor the Imp is available in they also sell a surface mount module. http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/IMP002-S-US-TR/1413-1001-1-ND/3979641 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/IMP002-S-US-TR/1413...
- fragmede 12y agoThat form factor is just as useless without a breakout board so I'm not sure what your point is. I mean, to be pedantic, they'll also sell you the chip by itself, sans FCC certification, which is even more* useless. * http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/LBWA1ZV1CD-TEMP/490-9776-ND/4975745 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/LBWA1ZV1CD-TEMP/490...
- teraflop 12y agoThat countdown showing the number of remaining orders with free shipping is a stroke of marketing genius. It certainly worked on me.
- yournemesis 12y agoIt had the opposite effect on me. I saw that I missed out on free shipping so I didn't order one.
- prawn 12y agoIt confused me. It started as white and 1000/1000, so I wasn't sure if that meant all were available or none were available - I suspected all were available. Then I scrolled down and the progress bar became blue and looked more as though none were available.
- 300bps 12y ago...which is why it should disappear completely after it is no longer relevant. After all, stores don't leave their signs up after a sale is over. "Oh sorry, yeah - that was $19 yesterday. We sold a ton of them! You can buy it today for $26 though."
- georgemcbay 12y agoI had a similar situation with the Nexus 9 tablet. "I should get a Nexus 9, I do a lot of Android app development on my Nexus 7 and it is getting long in the tooth, $400... not bad" -> Nexus 9 on sale for half-price on release day (limited quantities) -> Missed the release window -> "Nexus 9 just doubled in price, I don't want to pay $400 for one" Rationally I recognize that the value of the Nexus 9 relative to the $400 regular price didn't change at all due to the temporary sale, but emotional-response-wise it doesn't matter.
- cmsmith 12y agoBased on these specs: https://store.spark.io/ https://store.spark.io/ this appears to be a complete upgrade * from the Spark Core, correct? So waiting 5 months will get you a better product at half the price? * it appears to be missing the option for external flash storage, but that's not a big deal as they've upgraded the built in storage.
- niutech 12y agoExactly! You will get an open source platform with 120MHz STM32 CPU, 128 KB RAM, 1MB Flash, BCM433 802.11b/g/n with SoftAP for half the price. And you can easily attach an external SD card: https://github.com/technobly/SparkCore-SD https://github.com/technobly/SparkCore-SD or https://enabler.tilt.com/usd-fram-shield https://enabler.tilt.com/usd-fram-shield
- Florin_Andrei 12y agoThat's pretty awesome.
- danielsiders 12y agoSeems dangerously close to SparkFun (https://sparkfun.com https://sparkfun.com) trademark and space. I had to look hard to figure out it wasn't a sparkfun product.
- deelowe 12y agoThe core has been around for a while. Don't think there will be any issue at this point.
- song 12y agoOh I kind of assumed it was made by the same guys actually... I remembered buying some stuff on sparkfun a long time ago and just remembered the spark part of the name.
- mcescalante 12y agoVery different companies and both have been doing their thing for a bit. A small subset of people may confuse them, but it should be very clear right away from seeing their sites that one is what I'll call a "product based company" while the other is an online store.
- habosa 12y agoOrdered one, $20 is very much in the impulse range. I hope I'm not missing something: is this a smaller, better, cheaper version of the Core? If so, does the Core only exist until the Photon starts shipping?
- mahyarm 12y agoSo why would I choose this over a $20 Raspberry Pi?
- georgemcbay 12y agoSmaller, lighter, wifi. There are of course many reasons why you would choose a $20 Raspberry Pi over this as well (far more memory, more powerful CPU, runs a full user OS, etc). It all depends on what you need it to do.
- Florin_Andrei 12y agoProbably much less DC power needed, too. Way less.
- LukeB_UK 12y ago$20 is a great price. I was going to get one until I found out that shipping would be another $10 on top. Edit: I'm in the UK.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoYou can buy a much cheaper WiFi module... http://hackaday.com/2014/10/25/an-sdk-for-the-esp8266-wifi-chip/ http://hackaday.com/2014/10/25/an-sdk-for-the-esp8266-wifi-c... The ESP8266 is roughly $5 (including shipping), and has an active community, and community driven SDK. It is available in the UK, and everywhere else that DealXtreme ship to (other sellers are available).
- LukeB_UK 12y agoAwesome, thank you for this!
- makomk 12y agoBear in mind that the ESP8266 is nowhere near as polished or easy to get going with as the Spark Core. The toolchain to build firmware on your own PC and load it on is much more experimental and buggy for ESP8266, and because it doesn't have an equivalent of their cloud IDE, that's the only way you can get your code running on it.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoThat's where the community support comes in handy... http://www.esp8266.com/ http://www.esp8266.com/ ...note that there's even a subforum for compiler setup. I thought this was interesting too; using an ESP8266 to wirelessly program an Arduino... http://hackaday.com/2014/11/13/programming-an-arduino-over-wifi-with-the-esp8266/ http://hackaday.com/2014/11/13/programming-an-arduino-over-w...
- bobdvb 12y agoGiven that it is less than $5 compared to $20 there is a world of difference in price.
- felixrieseberg 12y agoThis looks really, really interesting. It also seems like they're thinking a lot about tooling, which I appreciate - there's a lot of stuff out there right now, I assume the true differentiator will be in the tooling. On that note, there's a weird "don't go back" loop at https://www.spark.io/signup https://www.spark.io/signup.
- bravo22 12y agoTooling? You mean software toolset or mechanical tooling?
- roehst 12y agoI know nothing about IOT. Is this revolutionary? It does look awesome.
- fragmede 12y agoThe IoT revolution is inherently price conscious. It's not that any of this stuff is new, it's that I can buy a device cheap enough to consider adding wifi to everything, including a temperature sensor on my toaster, to show me temperature graphs for the perfect toast. It could be done 10 years ago, but spending $200 to internet-enable my toaster is ridiculous, but for $25 ($20 + a temperature sensor), it's a fun and silly weekend project. Spark themselves make the Core, which is $40, which is the same ecosystem, and also wifi shields for Arduino have existed for a while, though they aren't as cheap, and on the larger side, Raspberry Pi's have USB, which means you can just plug in a USB dongle. So I say yes, for $20 to go from wifi -> breadboard, this is revolutionary.
- mark-r 12y agoA temperature sensor in the fridge would be much more useful than one on the toaster. I may have to get me one of these.
- notatoad 12y ago$19 for a wifi board that actually does stuff is pretty cool. maybe not totally revolutionary, but definitely worthy of mention.
- roehst 12y agoI know nothing about IOT. Is this revolutionary? It does look awesome.
- canadaj 12y agoI just pre-ordered! This looks fantastic for what I'm trying to do; reading temperatures of barbecues and smokers via wifi. I already have a working prototype using a Raspberry Pi, but of course I needed to add a USB wifi dongle and a sturdy case, as well as a beefy power supply to keep it all going. This will drastically reduce my overhead! I can't wait!
- Florin_Andrei 12y agoWell, in theory you could use a small Arduino and some sort of wireless module - but yeah, Spark is more convenient.
- canadaj 12y agoYes, I am much more comfortable with software rather than hardware, so the Pi seemed like a good idea at the time. Plus I've re-purposed it a handful of times already.
- dmritard96 12y agoSpark seems very cool, but I think what worries me as a product builder is any gaurentees that the cloud service will be around in a couple years. Certainly not suggesting that it won't be, just that if I build a product with this, I will want my own version of the cloud as an open source project that I can license or something.
- zsupalla 12y agoThe cloud back-end is open source so you can do that: http://www.github.com/spark/spark-server http://www.github.com/spark/spark-server
- mark-r 12y agoHow hard is it to reprogram the device to use your own server using that back end? How about if you wanted to do your own back end?
- Florin_Andrei 12y agoI'm assuming it's just one function call?
- mcescalante 12y agoI believe that to do this without using any of the existing firmware you would just want to grab a JTAG programmer and flash your own version of their firmware, or a custom blend of something. Flashing it is easy and they've got plenty of instructions on the web.
- middleca 12y agoYou can actually do this with a usb cable, or flash your own firmware over the air, you'd only need a jtag programmer if you wanted to replace the open-source bootloader :)
- CamperBob2 12y agoIt seems to me that these sorts of devices are using WiFi for jobs that are better suited to Bluetooth LE. Most wireless applications I'd have in mind wouldn't need a server at all, since they'd be intended for use within the same room or the same house. But WiFi requires me to drag in an entire HTTP server infrastructure whether I want one or not, because my PC can only talk to one access point at a time. It also requires a lot of heavyweight configuration work just to add the device to my secured WiFi network.
- jkaljundi 12y agoOT: What's the best similar thing with Bluetooth connectivity nowadays?
- jwcooper 12y agoI'm not sure what you're looking to do with bluetooth, but Adafruit has a few breakout boards using bluetooth: https://www.adafruit.com/category/255 https://www.adafruit.com/category/255 (disclaimer: I work for Adafruit)
- toddmatthews 12y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but this is similar to the Electric Imp in that you have to connect via their cloud service (you can not just make requests directly to any web endpoint). While this might be cheap, and great for prototyping, I dont want to build on top of something that locks me into your cloud service. They get you to buy a cheap piece (pricepoint) of hardware, but then you have to pay them to connect. I'd rather use an RaspberryPi or Arduino Yun. While more expensive up front, they allow you to connect to any service you would like.
- jwcooper 12y agoNearly everything is open source; firmware, hardware design files, and an api compatible server: https://github.com/spark https://github.com/spark
- toddmatthews 12y agoI stand corrected
- hrjet 12y agoNice. Why do you say "nearly", what is the missing piece then?
- stedaniels 12y agoSome API calls, and load balancer horizontal scaling multi user magic.
- song 12y agoTried to preorder one for a project I have in mind, saw that shipping to France is around $30... With the size of the package, they definitely could be cheaper. It's a bit annoying living in Europe and having to pay a tax on shipping whenever something interesting comes out. EDIT: Just after typing this comment I tried again and now I have the option to ship it to France for $10. There seems to be a bug somewhere on their checkout form.
- pimlottc 12y agoThat picture needs some context for scale. My first impression was that it had a normal USB port and was much larger.
- smilekzs 12y agoPreordered. I actually develop bare-metal on STM32Fx so this is a no-brainer. It might be tempting to see this as a device locked to the cloud, but really it isn't -- if you're put up with their firmware just plug in your favorite JTag debugger and flash your own.
- cheapsteak 12y agoSuggestion - put in some social sharing meta tags. It literally takes two minutes. Here's a quickie to make it semi presentable on facebook ``` <meta property="og:title" content="Introducing the Photon IoT Toolkit"> <meta property="og:image" content="https://s3.amazonaws.com/spark-website/photon-hero.jpg"> https://s3.amazonaws.com/spark-website/photon-hero.jpg"> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Spark"> <meta property="og:description" content="A $19 postage stamp-sized hackable Wi-Fi module for interacting with physical things."> ``` Also, $59.04 to ship to Canada? And why does it cost twice as much to ship to Canada than to France?
- bbcbasic 12y agoThe site is too marketing-y. How about some technical specs? What battery do I need to run it? What voltage? Can I switch mains voltage? Etc.
- mcescalante 12y agoI think that the market they're aiming to capture is the people who want to get stuff "internet enabled", but don't have the technical expertise to do so with the existing more DIY-intensive options like RPi or Arduino, so them leaning more towards a market-y design-y webpage sort of makes sense
- bbcbasic 12y agoThere is something missing then. Does this $19 device do anything useful on it's own? Or do you have to buy one of the up sells e.g. the sprinkler system for $199 to get it do do anything useful?