I am surprised that there has been no forum chatter on Your October newsletter.
Coming in November: our next-generation dev kit
We've got new hardware on the horizon! The spiritual sequel of the Spark Core is deep in development and will be announced in November. We're pretty excited about what we're cooking up. So what can you expect? Here's a rundown of some of the major new features:
A new hardware architecture that is backwards-compatible with the Spark Core
More RAM and flash, and a faster processor
A new more consistent set-up process
Less expensive
A clearer path from prototyping to production
I Know Your newsletter says announcement in november but can the team give us some clues ?
We can’t quite share details yet, as there are some things that we can’t quite share, and some decisions that have not yet been made. We’ll be making the official announcement in early November (assuming that everything goes according to plan) and will share details beforehand in the community as we’re able to. Sorry for the cryptic answer!
Cant wait to see what You come up with. With chips like the ESP8266 which have recently become available the market is certainly going to get interesting.
+1 on BLE support.
When you say BLE support, are you imagining BLE and WiFi on the same board? Or are you thinking of a BLE only board that works with the spark cloud through a gateway (smartphone, tablet, Core+BLE shield, etc)?
I am working on the latter and generally just trying to figure out what people would find more beneficial.
I suppose both have their merits/weaknesses. I think anything <$20 that brings the ease of arduino to developing code both on the micro side and the PC/Tablet/Smartphone side will be a winner. There is plenty of competition on the BLE front (RFDuino, relayr, mcthings, bean ,bleduino, redbear etc). I think there is more opportunity on the wifi side to build something interesting.
I am more of a hardware guy so for me anything that makes the interface on the other end (PC/WEB/Smartphone) easier will probably get my vote. Currently playing with CC3200 launchpad reporting to exosite cloud and I am very impressed with how slick it is.
You have a nice website - I see you already have several of the platforms I mentioned.
PS - My name is Ian and I have a dev board / kickstarter problem
Yes, I think I share your affliction for dev boards, and certainly dev boards on Kickstarter!
The reason I started with SparkLE was because I was building a product with BLE inside, and none of the dev boards out there had what I wanted. Most restrict you to some custom profile and don’t allow access to other profiles (like HOGP), and none had cloud access/remote FW updates/security built in.
To make SparkLE, I must also have a gateway. Phone apps are the logical place to start, but I was also thinking of a shield to plug a Core in to that would have a BLE device in a central role, so it’s a standalone gateway. The thought has struck me that I could integrate the two more and basically create one board with both Wifi and BLE. So that board would act as a gateway in my case, but could also just be a Spark Core clone with BLE on board.
A Core + BLE board would certainly be more work then just a shield, and there are inherent issues with it like interference, but if that had enough interest in itself (even without SparkLE), then it could be worth doing.
