Devices with more RAM?

[jernstlun]

Are there some devices / prototype boards / … that are known to run the Particle firmware and WiFi networking, and can connect to the Particle cloud, but have a lot more RAM?

(For algorithm development, it would be advantageous for us to be able to capture a lot of data – more than we will ever do for the production device – but running the same code)

[ScruffR]

How about a Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi comes to Particle! Sign up for the beta

Hey Particle friends, If you’ve been keeping an eye on the forums in the last month, you may have noticed that we’ve hinted in various posts at a possible collaboration between Raspberry Pi and Particle. Last night on Adafruit’s Ask An Engineer, we announced the big news: ###All existing Raspberry Pi devices, as of late November, will be able to connect to the Particle Cloud! We’ll be launching Raspberry Pi support for individual Particle accounts as a beta to start, and rolling out access to…

[jernstlun]

Hmm! That’s an idea!! Real-time behavior would be different, though, because my understanding is that the Particle code on the RPi is running on top of Linux. Is that correct?

I signed up for the beta some time ago, but never heard anything. Is that public now?

[ScruffR]

The first couple thousand Beta slots were filled rather quickly, but Will recently mentioned that the rest of the Beta applications should get handled till end of January.

Raspberry Pi comes to Particle! Sign up for the beta

Hey @adam704a – we have not yet opened up the beta to our entire signup list, but hope to do so before the end of January. If you haven’t received an email, you probably haven’t received access yet. Hang tight! Thanks for your patience.

[peekay123]

@jernstlun, how much RAM is “a lot more RAM”?

[jernstlun]

@peekay: there are a bunch of different use cases. Twice (i.e. of the available) RAM of the Photon would be good, more even better.

[peekay123]

@jernstlun, is external SPI RAM a possibility?

[jernstlun]

@peekay123: excellent idea. This might work.

[peekay123]

@jernstlun, how much data “churn” are you looking at? You could use external flash instead coupled with SPIFFS which is a file system for external flash. It includes wear-leveling to get the most life from the external flash.

[jernstlun]

Wear should not be an issue, this is just for instrumenting a bunch of test/beta kind of setups to collect more data than the production device. If it fails, no big deal.

[peekay123]

@jernstlun, external SPI flash is cheap and easy to use. With SPIFFS you can store your data in a file format making. I had it running on a 1MB SPI flash just fine. You could also use a microSD along with the SDFat library on Build. It supports DMA and is very fast.

Take a look at this topic:

Suggestions for using external flash SPI

Hi, I looking for advices. I have a project where I use a particle photon with external 1MB flash (winbond or IS25LQ080-JNLE-TR) or particle p1 with an LCD and I want to store fonts and image to the external memory. I wont write anything to this memory while my code is running. I only need to program it once and after that I will only read it. I did some research and found that one way would be to use the flahsee-eeprom library with fatfs. Using a virutal fat drive to build generate an image …

The code link for SPIFFS is here:

Suggestions for using external flash SPI

here is a quick example of a particle photon using SPIFFS to store a downloaded file from the internet (actually a jpg file file) but it can be a text file or html file… The code is far from optimal but it’s working.