Particle Announces Three New IoT Products and Particle Mesh Shipping At Spectra

Particle Updates
1

Originally published at: https://blog.particle.io/2018/10/03/particle-announces-three-new-iot-products-and-particle-mesh-shipping-at-spectra/

At Particle, it is important to us that you have all the tools you need to build connected IoT products. That is why we were proud to announce three all-new IoT products, along with shipping information for Particle Mesh, at Spectra, our first conference for IoT builders.

Specifically, we announced:

  1. Particle IoT Rules Engine (Beta), a drag-and-drop IoT application builder to accelerate your time to market.
  2. Particle Workbench (Developer Preview), a free, all-in-one offering to develop, program, and debug professional-grade apps for the Particle platform.
  3. Particle Mesh Shipping October - Particle’s next generation hardware will now ship in October 2018.
  4. Particle Mesh SOMs (System on Modules), an enterprise-grade, production-scale version of Particle Mesh.
These new products were built with your needs in mind and the feedback we heard from your experiences. We’re excited to roll them out and see how you use them to build real IoT products. To learn more, you can read in-depth about these new products below:

Particle IoT Rules Engine — It’s Time to Simplify IoT App Building

Particle, IoT Rules Engine
Particle, IoT Rules Engine1050×581

The Rules Engine’s visual interface allows you to easily create and wire together app logic

The Particle IoT Rules Engine is a drag-and-drop IoT application builder designed to accelerate your time to market. The Rules Engine provides a visual interface to create and wire together if-this-then-that style logic — enabling customers to create business rules in the cloud that react to events in the physical world.

The IoT Rules Engine offers powerful yet flexible building blocks to create the rules needed for any IoT use case. For instance, real-time alerting, IoT data management, OTA firmware automation, seamless 3rd party integrations, and more. Built on IBM’s Node-RED widely adopted open-source tool designed for IoT, builders can benefit from thousands of community-contributed logic snippets, called nodes, to supercharge their workflows.

The visual nature of the tool enables anyone on your team to use the IoT Rules Engine, not just engineers. Enlist customer success teams to create support-related flows when devices experience problems. Or, call on business analysts to create marketing automation based on sensor data. It’s all possible with the IoT Rules Engine.

The IoT Rules Engine is now available in beta, and you can apply for access here.

Professional Desktop Experience Powered by Visual Studio Code

Particle, Particle Workbench
Particle, Particle Workbench2880×1800

An all-in-one development offering to program and debug professional-grade apps

Particle Workbench is a new, all-in-one desktop experience optimized for professional IoT development. Powered by Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Particle Workbench provides all the tools you need to program and debug professional-grade apps for the Particle platform in a single download.

Particle Workbench includes features to help you create and deploy IoT devices locally and offline. In addition to Visual Studio Code’s features like IntelliSense, breakpoint debugging, and Git support, we’ve added tooling for local compilation, hardware debugging, OTA wireless updates, and more.

By including Visual Studio Code, you will also have access to over 8,000 extensions from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace in addition to custom extensions that drive Particle Workbench. You can get access to the Particle Workbench developer preview here.

Particle Mesh Shipping in October

1151×544

Particle Mesh - Argon, Boron, and Xenon

More than 35,000 orders have been placed for Particle Mesh since we initially introduced the three new hardware modules in February of 2018. Shipping officially begins in October and we could not be more excited to fulfill your order for our next generation hardware.

Particle Mesh is now officially available in our retail store here.

Introducing Enterprise-Grade Mesh Hardware: Particle Mesh SOMs

1764×1000

Particle Mesh SOMs - An enterprise-grade, production-scale version of Particle Mesh

In addition to the release of Particle Mesh developer kits, Particle Mesh SOMs (System on Module) are officially under development and will be available in 2019. These Particle Mesh SOMs are an enterprise-grade, production-scale version of our mesh developer boards.

Like our E Series modules, Particle Mesh SOMs are designed to allow you to easily transition from prototype to production when building large-scale IoT products. When officially released, these mesh-enabled SOMs will be available with Wi-Fi and LTE/GSM connectivity, allowing you to connect to the wireless network of your choice.

What’s Next?

Stay tuned for more updates from Spectra throughout the day and the next couple of weeks. We will continue sharing and publishing information from the conference floor as it comes available.

Your feedback on Particle software, hardware, and ongoing conversations with the Particle team have helped us shape our product with the right tools to support your success. We’re excited to hear what you think and what problem you’ll solve next.

11 Likes
2

Why Workbench when there is Desktop IDE?

3

The Desktop IDE will be replaced by Workbench (or at least that’s my take on it). It is WAY more capable and supports things the Desktop IDE (based on Atom) does not.

3 Likes
4

Does the Rules Engine mean Particle is dropping integration support for Losant?

1 Like
5

Why would you think that? Losant does not need special support by Particle. Losant is using Particle's SSE subscribe mechanism (amongst other APIs) just as any other service could do and as long Losant supports the Particle connection you can build your dashboards with that just the same.
Particle wouldn't lock out other services that actually help them to be more attractive to a wider range of users.

4 Likes
6

Looks like I'm going to need to learn how to use Visual Studio now :thinking:

I know it's what some of the more experienced guys are using.

I'm hoping the learning curve is not too much compared to using the desktop IDE.

I'm happy to see Particle and it's products + tools keep evolving into better stuff. :spark:

1 Like
7

will these particle mesh devices will be able to communicate directly with wireless temperature sensors which are using Xbee module?
Or do we have to connect the receiver with these controllers also?

8

AFAIK Xbee protocoll is not on the list.

9

@barry65, Xbee uses a the Zigbee protocol on top of the 802.15.4 protocol. The Particle mesh uses OpenThread on top of 802.15.4 which is not compatible with Zigbee.

10

VS Code is awesome.
Learning curve: you'll be fine (and perhaps loving it) in few days, believe me!

3 Likes
11

@WoobaGooba — Jeff here from the Particle team. No, we are not dropping any of our support for Integrations. This will continue to function as expected!

3 Likes
12

So is the Rules Engine a paid service?

13

Good to hear that! I’ll let ya know what I think after giving it a go :slight_smile:

1 Like
14

rules engine will have a yet to be determined payment plan that will enable hobbyist to still use it for free and enterprises to pay a monthly fee. at least that is my understanding coming out of the conference

15

How about Particle Workbench? It’s an offline tool that shouldn’t require a cloud service, but I am wondering if the signup to download it is just for this early version or for future tracking.

16

It runs on VScode, and is simply an add-on extension for VScode.

VScode is free, however I think some extensions are not.

Either way, I’m 99% sure the Particle extension will be free (Particle has a financial incentive to make it free so that people don’t use their Web IDE and use their cloud compiling services as much, which will bring down their back-end costs).

2 Likes
17

How soon could we get dimensional and pinout/connector specs for the SOM B series? Will there be any changes with regards to power management or other supporting ICs that we need to interface with?

Thanks!

18

I was thinking the same thing @RWB. We got this buddy… well maybe you do. lol.

1 Like
19

you got this too :wink:

1 Like
20

The pinouts for the SoM have not been released yet. It’s an M.2 NGFF connector. It’s designed to support two-sided modules, 22x30 mm or 22x42mm. I believe it has 67 pins, a key to prevent installing the module upside down, and a screw to hold the module in place securely.

The main difference from the E series module, aside from being smaller and have an edge connector, is that the PMIC is not included on the SoM. This allows for things like X series powered by a disposable coin cell lithium with no PMIC at all (lower cost, size, and power), or using a different PMIC that’s better suited for solar, for example.

4 Likes