You assume we haven't already heard Particle's side of the story?
We (or at least I do) read every single post in this forum and hence have heard most the questions several times before and try to multiply the answers we have read from Particle in order to save them the time to.
Sure, but 5 of some thousand members in this forum and 140k users world wide - hardly a representative batch.
BTW: These community "experts" - as you called us - are the moderators of this forum and have been appointed by Particle due to persistent support and value for the community and Particle as well.
We are no self-professed "experts" or imposters and won't be told to be.
I think the usefulness of this combo is larger than your assuming it is.
Cellular is Big, Wifi is Big, how could both of them not be desired by a decent amount of people building products? It's just the best of both worlds at a lower production cost.
I would love to hear what Particle has to say about the possibility direclty. I'm sure they have there reasons but maybe they are open to the merging of their 2 most popular products into one. @will
The future is LTE so ideally, LTE + Wifi and add in the Mesh + BLE and you have it all in one.
I totally agree they are great at making things easy for non experts like myself. I love Particle and what they are offering.
I was saying paying for a board with a Wifi and Cellular radio on it even though cellular may not be needed in all cases is not a problem considering the products they go into resell for 1-7.5 thousand dollars each.
I was saying I would prefer to pay more for a single MCU + Cellular + Wifi radio board design than having to tackle having a Photon + Electron on the same board where I would need to have firmware running on both devices to manage communication between the 2 of them. Plus the added power consumption for running both units at the same time when needed.
ScruffR your an expert at this stuff so things are easier to accomplish with your skill set, its us new guys who just want / need to keep things as simple as possible considering we have so many othings to tackle when it comes to brining a new product to life and Particle helps out tremondously in that respect.
The easier they make it the better for all of us.
I'm sure it will be great and I'm very excited about it.
I bet they end up offering it eventually.
The combo makes perfect sense to me and others on here as a product creators.
Having this conversation is good though, were not going to agree on everything, that's just the way it goes.
@ScruffR Thanks for your endless support on this forum, it makes a big difference.
Yup, the key word here is future but currently the global coverate is too fragmented - that's the reason why Particle "had to" have two Borons. The cards may get shuffled better in favour of a Cellular/WiFi/mesh combo once the global support has established, but as I'm not "expert" I'll refrain from exhausting my competence.
But one thing I dare to say. If members can convince the "experts" (however one might view us) we will try to help draw Particle's attention to the proposal too and when an argument is convincing enough for us you may have made a long way in convincing Particle too (hope I'm not stretching my luck here )
I understand that Particle are focusing on what they rightly see as their core market and have been interested to see the variety of applications that are being developed.While I personally would like to see an LTE/WiFI variant I can understand why it might not be a high priority.
The latest boards have offered me several alternatives. The ability to use a third party sim is interesting given that the data allowances/charges for Particle/Telstra are several orders of magnitude higher than are available over the Optus network.in Australia. Again this reflects that my needs are different from the market that Particle is addressing.
The other option is to exfiltrate the data via bluetooth once the devices are back in the lab.
Above all. I would like to express my thanks to Scruffr, Peekay123 and others who generously donate their time and efforts on this board. I have learned a lot by following a number of threads. Thanks guys.
I'll give my two cents on some of the points here:
Agreed, for singular deployments, a combination might make more sense. That said, the added cost of a WiFi gateway does leave more room for resources on the embedded device, as well as allow for future expansion (where you'd make up for the cost difference).
Cellular meshing to a WiFi enabled gateway should provide the same functionality, unless you plan on using WiFi on multiple locations for extended periods.
Yes, and no. It might increase cost if only a single device is needed, but as soon as multiple devices can make use of that once Cellular gateway, you quickly start saving money.
Moreover, it might cost slightly more for customers who want Cellular in addition to WiFi, but it will definitely save costs for all others that don't require this. They then wouldn't have to pay for the (relatively expensive) Cellular modem they have no intentions of using.
If you haven't got a use case for which both radios are a must, you're always paying too much for a radio you're not going to use. Furthermore, resources on the device will be taken up because they need to support multiple radios, which may or may not be used.
That's the cost for a client VS the effort you want to put in. Fair enough, for installations around that price point it might not make too much of a difference for singular units, but when you're talking 1000+ deployments, those numbers quickly add up. Also, not everyone intends to stick this to $1000+ devices. If I wanted an asset tracker for my bike, I'd prefer not paying for features I don't need (or would take up precious resources). If the WiFi modem continuously had to scan for WiFi precedence, battery life would take a serious hit (for example).
In trying to get a feel for the possibilities, I swapped "wifi" with "mesh" and the scenario would still make sense, in my opinion. You'd substitute the on-board WiFi for a always-on WiFi gateway. Unless you intend on using WiFi in multiple locations, this shouldn't make a difference functionality wise?
Agreed, when using multiple known locations, WiFi would make a bit more sense. The situations in which this is the case would be limited, I think. With Cellular data becoming cheaper, wouldn't it be viable to say that for those times the product isn't at 'home', the cellular usage would be negligible? (Especially when you're talking about 1k-7k devices?).
Agreed, but consider the fact that you MCU would have to 'power' that WiFi chip as well, in terms of storage, processing, electrical, etc. It's a matter of determining where you want your power to be distributed. I see IoT as a form of 'cloud computing', where you have 'light' end-nodes, and do the heavy lifting elsewhere, where power/processing is not an issue.
I say this with no bad intentions, but I'd describe that as a 'lazy' solution VS an 'optimal one'. The benefit of the current portfolio is that they're generally code compatible, as well as pin compatible. Especially Gen3 does this with the feather form factor. Switching from boards thus shouldn't be harder than picking a different SKU.
Otherwise, you, or the end-customer, would end up paying (in cost or performance) for something they wouldn't ever use.
The higher cost is debatable, and would be quickly outweighed depending on the quantities deployed, I think.
In the US maybe, but there are quite a few other countries/continents out there where 2g/3g isn't gone anytime soon, let alone be able to offer LTE.
That ESP alone might not be too expensive, but if you wanted to maintain Mesh, you'd still need the Nordic. This would add financially, but also in terms of performance, since that WiFi system would have to be supported in addition to the Cellular business.
If you're dismissing the Nordic, you might want to opt for a more powerful ESP, adding on cost again. Then you'd also have to port the who thing over to ESP and deal with everything that comes with that.
Wouldn't a WiFi gateway work here? For one-off devices might be slightly more of a setup, but once you get multiple device going, should pay for itself.
Nobody seems to mind having to get a WiFi router to enable WiFi connectivity, but when a new technology is introduced, that might be more suitable, it's suddenly becoming problematic to add a 'Mesh router'. Yes, I know that WiFi is omni-present, but as a concept, it should be too different?
As much as it is your good right as a member of 'the community' to tell Particle what the market is according to your views, it's our good right to chime in on what we think is going on. An open discussion has never hurt anyone?
Since you're new to the community, you might not know that these 'experts' you speak of have been here since the very early days of the company, longer than many of its employees. We have direct communication with Particle and as such have a feeling for what's going on behind the scenes. We've also spent more time on this community than Particle as a whole, so in our 'defense', I do think we've got a fair view of what the market is, as far as the community is concerned. With that said, all our comments and opinions are our own, and should not be considered official statements from Particle in any which way.
That's assuming 'the rest of you' is everyones else, and all those folks want wifi+cellular? In our humble 'expert' views, that's not what the activity on the community has shown. If there was that much of an interest, there should've been more activity in this regard than what has been displayed over the last couple of years. then again, we're just 'a few guys' with a collective read time of over 250 days, what do we know?
As @ScruffR has mentioned, we do not decide what happens at Particle. We do, however, voice the concerns of the community to Particle on a regular basis. If we feel there's a real demand for something, be damn sure we'll let them know about it, and advocate for it whenever we can.
We have nothing to lose, or gain, by (not) having a WiFi+cellular board, but Particle does. If you can't even convince us that something like that would be worthwhile considering (or at least get us to give it the benefit of the doubt), then it's going to be hard convincing a company who has to invest time, money, and resources for years to come to make it a reality. The best argument you can give is convincing use-cases where such a product can be used, and where it would make a difference. Is it too much to ask for one of those, without being allowed to offer fair criticism?
I'm hoping you can convince me of that usefulness, hence the discussion
Though both technologies are big, they each have their merits and pitfalls. Unless you actively need both of them to work, you're paying for something you don't need (in terms of money or performance, either way). Apparently there isn't such a demand at Particle (yet) that made them opt for that solution. Please do give them incentive
There are few scenarios I can think of in one would need an all in one, other than "I don't want to optimize during development". Again, please do prove me wrong.
With Mesh, you wouldn't have than Second board in your embedded device, but rather as a gateway, much like your current WiFi router is now. Adding that second radio to the board would have almost the same impact as adding a second device in your embedded one. Additional power and resource costs, in a place where those are limited.
I don't consider myself an expert, but would still consider it way simpler to simply plug in a WiFi Gateway, rather than having to deal with all the coding for combined radios? I could be wrong though...
Finally, let's say a Wifi + Cellular is to be made using an ESP32 and whatever Cellular modem. That would mean new hardware would have to be developed (the easy part), but would also require Particle to be ported to the ESP, and updated/maintained for years to come. That's also mean an additional code base which might not be compatible with other devices. There's more to it than just slapping an extra chip on the board.
Hi everyone - Jonathan from Particle here. Let me start off by saying that this discussion is amazing and one of the reasons I love being part of our community. Thank you for the detailed requests, thoughtful replies and an overall respect for each other.
The way we decide what hardware to build is by listening to the community, talking to customers and observing where the pain points are. For example, when we decided to go into cellular, it was because of the broad set of use cases where Wi-Fi wasn’t available or accessible. That proved to be a good decision! With Mesh, we observed many users struggling to add local communication but were frustrated at the scale/cost/power consumption/complexity of doing so.
For future hardware and accessories our plan is to use the same strategy: listen to the community, talk to customers and observe where the pain points are. We have nothing to announce yet (we just announced 7 products!) but the feedback and use cases discussed here will part of the decision making process. As someone asked above, we’re not saying “no” or “we’ll never” to something like Wi-Fi + LTE, just not right now. To be crystal clear, our focus now is to deliver the ~14k units of high-quality Mesh hardware, new Device OS firmware, mobile apps and Device Cloud interfaces that goes into making something like Mesh real and useable.
I also wanted to clarify the importance to our community of moderators like @ScruffR, @Moors7 & others. They’re experienced Particle users who donate their knowledge, experience & free time to help others. Since we can’t be everywhere and read each and every post, they help Particle to uncover the most pressing issues in the community and raise awareness to things we might have overlooked. To that end, you should consider them your advocates for the community. And if you share the same level of passion of Particle and would like to pitch in - let us know, we could always use more helping hands here in our growing community.
Final thought - we want this forum to be a welcoming and open place. If you’re new, start a post saying “hi” and what brought you here. Post a question, share ideas and tell us about new features you’d like to see. You’re all welcome here.
Thanks,
Jonathan and the rest of the Particle team.
It's nice to know Particle is not at all against this idea and that you guys are always willing to listen to the desires of your clientele and take them into consideration when thinking about how to better serve the marketplace which allows Particle to keep growing.
It just feels better than being told NO, what you want does not make sense, when your certain it would solve some real-world pain points you come up against when wanting to integrate both technologies into a single product
)
Meant in only good fun. Particle rocks, the new products rock, the Elites support rocks, the community rocks.
and the team.