Poll: / Discussion: What do you want to see next from Particle?

Queued firmware upgrades
Reliable firmware upgrades, currently its a bit hit and miss to update devices.
Reliable deep sleep and wakeup.
Lower deep sleep current (if possible)

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+1!

Attach a bigger antennae. Iā€™m using one like this on a Photon :smile:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/2-4GHz-High-Gain-Wifi-9dbi-RPSMA-GOLD-Antenna-For-Wireless-Router/543875899.html

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I voted hardware, more specifically a more powerful microcontroller with more RAM, specifically to be able to process SSL certs in true IoT scenarios since HTTPS is required (without requiring the webhook) for cloud backends like Azure. Bluetooth on a separate device that follows the same footprint would be awesome too.

On the software side, I would love a better IDE too. As a Visual Studio user Iā€™m kinda spoiled. I would love to see you create a VSIX plug-in to use VS instead of Atom. Similar to VisualMicro that lets me use Visual Studio for Arduino development (it rocks!)

Keep up the great work, I love your devices!

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Hi @christine
I voted for resources because I think that Particle is a great company that loves its community, creates awesome hardware and software but needs more resources for its community. (I also kind of want all of the other stuff. :smiley: )

I would love to see an offline native iPhone app of the Particle documentation for people to use to learn with, as well as use as a reference. The app would have lessons as well as example code, and it would maybe update the content in the app when the iPhone is connected to the internet and there is a documentation update.

I also think it would be useful to have an ā€œArduino Modeā€ on the Photon, so that it could be used as an Arduino when there is no wifi connection, allowing the Photon to be a more flexible device. It would also be nice if code could be flashed over serial like an Arduino, rather than with dfu-util. (dfu-util wonā€™t work for me :sob: )

I also wish that the Dashboard service was cheaper, as $50 a month seems kind of expensive. Thatā€™s the price of almost 3 Photons per month!

Good luck with the Electron release! :rocket:

Have you seen/tried the (semi-)Manual modes? They give you full control of the connection, including the choice not to use it at all. Using it completely offline is therefore most certainly possible.

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+1
I tried to get some feedback from particle on the matter here.
But no reply, maybe it drowned in the flow of topics, a small fee per device or multiple steps for pricing would be kinder to small projects, but maybe they are not interested in having small projects use the device management system.

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:particle: Particle has expressed its strong feelings for their root-supporters and the maker community, so they want you to be assured that they will always care about us one-man tinkerers.
In the background there was some discussion amongst Elites with Particle people (who are very approachable and awesome :smiley:) that the 49$ might be a bit steep for us, but the original focus-group for this offer are companies (for which this is peanuts), but officials promissed to keep our wishes in mind and maybe (!) might come up with more flexible pricing schemes in future.

I'd love to see that too - so keep your eyes and ears open :wink:

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-1 for Swift from me.
No offence intended, but if another language should be chosen, then pick one worth the effort. Can be python (Iā€™m not a python developer), can be Java (yeah, Iā€™m among those) or JavaScript, but not something used by 1% of the potential user base. Even Perl (which I somehow hate) can be!

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Sounds good, but I would not be so fast to disregard the price as peanuts to a company.
For companies its not 49/month, but 49 per seat per month, so it could lead to making that seat flexible, a price per unit or fixed price for access would prevent that too.

Say you have 5 developers and 2 managers that needs access to the system for a small scale iot deployment say 500units, you are looking at an ongoing expense of nearly 350$ per month for using particle, and 10$/month for using the competing solution.
It does not have to be a product you are selling for it to be interesting to have the management system, I have seen plenty of companies where such a monthly expense alone would kill the deal, so its not just one-man companies that wont jump on the wagon.

Anyways its getting OT, hopefully something aimed at <1000unit sales will show up, or alternatively a opensource solution based on using the API :slight_smile:

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@MORA I responded to your other thread, would love to continue the conversation on pricing over there!

Hardware:
a) An affordable wired core, connected via Ethernet (and PoE) or serial.
b) A dual-connected core core. This has been said before, but not as a separate feature.
c) A shield to control high power LEDs with RGB.

Software:
Other programming languages may be interesting, but also may introduce a lot of clutter.

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I would not drop Swift at first hand, just because only 1% of the developers are using it.
It is simply new, and is supported on only 2 platforms.

However, as a new language it has some worthwhile new featues.

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I donā€™t know swift so I canā€™t really get into the details, but in my life I never picked a language because of its features (otherwise I would probably be an Eiffel developer), but on the capabilities, libraries and support.
Iā€™m not saying I just use Java and consider anything else is useless, but Iā€™m not going to switch to Scala just because it is cool: I need a reason for the switch, and while functional programming is tempting, I havenā€™t found the necessity for it.
When it comes to introducing a new language to a community I consider being new as a downside rather than a benefit: if it doesnā€™t get audience I will be wasting my time and Iā€™m not going to get repaid for my efforts until it gets popular.
Another question I would ask myself is ā€œhow much is it diffused in my industryā€? The answer is probably going to be 0% at this stageā€¦

Thatā€™s my personal reasoning, not that it must be everyoneā€™s out there: I donā€™t even know if swift has to be considered a general purpose language or a iOS/UI/async language, in which case it would just not fit the purpose.

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I can confirm, that it is a general purpose language.
But that's not the point. I did not want to delve into the personal aspects of the choice. Every serious developer has a sense of taste here, and there is an immense amount of knowledge collected in discarded programming languages.

The question here is what languages should be supported on this particular particle platform. I would prefer as much as possible because I would like to respect the taste of all developers. Not the easy way, and especially not at Apple. They offer only 2 choices, and on Macs a backdoor through Unix for other languages like Python, Java etc.

Anyway: If swift is a language worth to consider, it should be, regardless of the authoring company or the popular vote of developers.

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Anyway: If swift is a language worth to consider, it should be, regardless of the authoring company or the popular vote of developers.

I agree with regards to the authoring company, disagree on the developer's vote: if and when another language would be introduced, should either be the most requested one, or the one the company strongly believe would be beneficial for the business.

Rust would likely be a more suitable language than Swift.

Sometimes choices are not based on what is best for the task but what
gets lots of people interested. If Swift is the new ā€˜cool kidā€™ then
perhaps 10X more people would be interested in using that and helping
with development.

Improved reliability. Nothing else matters until we can connect consistently to a diversity of WiFi networks using SoftAP from a variety of devices. Moreover that connection needs to remain open and working, available to the cloud, as well as local TCP and UDP.

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The photon is great, the electron will be amazing, but you canā€™t survive without offering a system with an embedded linux at some point. So my wish for the next step is a magical ā€œbosonā€ with gsm, wifi and onboard linuxā€¦ I already reserve 5 of these in advance for my next experimentations (provided you can make them less than say $60) :wink:

On the other side, I think particle cannot - and probably should not - try and substitute cloud businesses, and I would really appreciate if you guys were working towards offering a AWS IoT ready kit. I canā€™t at this time envision building a pro IoT device that wonā€™t use AWS services the easiest possible wayā€¦