Hi Everyone,
the new pricing structure announces last week is not meeting my needs for personal use (I track real time temperatures on a few devices (5). I was wondering if anyone has found a way to say goodbye to Particle while having most of the features. I am currently thinkering with NodeMCU and it is promising (minus the over the air programming).
Any thoughts… it’s time to leave particle due to a ridiculous cost of data over wifi!
Hey acktarus - sorry to hear about the the effects of the new pricing plan on your Particle use.
We’d love to understand your concerns a bit further & see if theres a way forward. Please drop us a note at http://support.particle.io , or feel free to DM me - I’d be happy to discuss the plan more and understand your concerns!
Thanks!
S.
For WiFi only, simply use a $3 ESP8266 and publish to AWS. I came to Particle for cellular.
Ah brilliant - secure MQTT a possibility?
Hi Daneboomer,
Without knowing exactly what your deployment is, there are a number of ways to solve your problem.
Basically set up a Mosquitto MQTT server on a Raspberry PI, and it can be made secure and exposed to the internet. It low power, and yours.
Then I added NodeRed
This is a system that allows you to process events passing through the MQTT server and be able to handle them, for example send the data to a database such as InfluxDB
Then you can custom visualise the data in the database using Grafana
There are tonnes of how to’s out there explaining it all and it is not hard to do. Also if you get anything wrong just reformat the SD card and try again.
I set up my own system that I wanted to be wholy within my own network, becasue I lost internet connectivity for about a year or two (my service provider here in the UK had such bad customer service I finally told them to shove it were the sun don’t shine) and still wanted home automation functions and data logging. Its cheep, it very robust and I can mix and match ESP2866’s ESP32’s or any network device. I can data log or get other devices to respond to each other, and can extend it over the net if I want to.
Thats why I dropped off the particle platform, a few years ago. Also the Argon meash thing wasn’t really working out.
But you can build your own set up.
Liam
I switched over to the ESP32 with 16MB of memory for $5.
I also found this site that shows how to do just about everything you could want to do with the ESP32 chips like OTA, Web Server Interfaces, ect…
I’ll stick with Particle for Cellular applications.
Wonder how many people have something similar in their code base now
#define USE_MQTT
MQTT works as a replacement to Particle.publish() however there are some security considerations and what you do with the data after. Node Red was mentioned as well as other tools to work with the data once it’s delivered.
If you don’t want to do any cloud, need stable OTA operation and scalability without the fuss, I am using Electric Imp both at home and at work. With them the first 100 wifi devices are actually free to use.
Over the years we have never lost connection with a single product in the field, that did not turn out to have defective HW or be deliberately blocked by a local IT organization. Language is squirrel, but it is not that different from C, and they have libraries for many things including integrations with clouds.
With Cellular I believe you have to pay for data also for the first 100 new devices, so Particle.io beats them there.