ok cool, that makes me a lot happier, i suppose then its pricing. how do i find that out?
Will Particle Mesh hardware be available in mass production form factors like the E-Series?
Yes! More details to come – Particle will release our plans for mass production form factors for Particle Mesh hardware before preorder delivery in July 2018.
ok, thats a long time to wait and not ideal timing, basically means it won’t be purchased for sale this year.
Working back from Christmas
- Stock available in stores October
- Mid August approve production run (6 weeks prior)
- Last production candidate prototype run Mid July
- First prototype order late June
- Design work early June
…if advance versions aren’t made available then I can’t switch products this year.
Let’s see if an official party chimes in!
My personal take is that for a new product to be announced and available in October is quite a feat. Considering all the necessary certification tests, logistics etc. 
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Hey there @mterrill – these dev kits are designed not only to address standalone Wi-Fi and Cellular use cases, but to work together to make mesh networking easy. As such, an ESP32-host board would not have been sufficient to create the toolset needed to fill the mesh-shaped hole we see in the world of IoT.
As I described in my previous post, we selected the nRF52840 because we believe it will become an industry leading IC for Bluetooth and Thread devices and has a great set of features for its size and cost. So, as far as the delivery schedule goes, one of the rate limiting factors here is availability of the nRF52840. Based on the schedule that has been communicated to us by Nordic, we are not able to deliver development kits sooner than July.
We intend to deliver mass production form factors as quickly as possible after initial dev kit delivery. We want the hardware to be available as badly as you do, and will work hard to ensure the gap in delivery is as small as possible.
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one thing i’m interested about is how the argon , or any of the newer devices for that matter, placed in the ethernet expansion will handle the throughput of a 10BaseT or 100BaseTX? will the argon be able to process a 5MB incoming transmission @ say 50Mbps to be saved on a sd card shield ? i read the BT tops out at 2Mbps so i’m wondering if that is a restriction of the nordic chip and if that means incoming ethernet data processing rate is also restricted, or capped at some speed level.? thanks.
Hi @dkryder - lots of different questions packed into one post! I’ll try my best to unpack, so please correct me if I misunderstand any part of your questions. At a high level, your asking about downlink performance on an Ethernet Gateway - say a Xenon + Ethernet FeatherWing. The chip used in the FeatherWing is the WIZnet W5500 - an Ethernet IC optimized for IoT use cases - think sensors or command+control, not streaming media. That said, it can handle 8 simultaneous sockets and has a 32KB buffer. The SPI interface will likely be the first bottleneck before the host processor. After that, how much you buffer in memory before writing to the SD card will be the next thing to consider. The primary use case for something like a mesh network is more about the local mesh collecting data and publishing to the Device Cloud, so it is not something we have evaluated yet. We’ll keep this question in mind as we develop!
Bluetooth’s speed is governed by the Bluetooth specification defined by the Bluetooth SIG. Bluetooth 5, the latest standard, defines new modes for different speed, range and throughput - all while keeping power usages lower than in the past. The nRF52840, found in every Particle Mesh defines, was the first chipset to implement all the features of Bluetooth 5, including up to 2Mbps.
HTH! This is kinda going OT, so if you have more questions about throughput or speed, feel free to fork and start a new topic.
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