Sales and concern general questions

General
1

Hi everyone, just curious on some concerns I have with Particle. I am currently prototyping with the ESP8266 chip and there are obvious improvements on the Particle platform over the ESP8266. My questions are this:

  1. If Particle is bought or goes out of business, Is there anything they can provide to assure the cloud service stays up or give a copy of the cloud service and I could host it locally. I am trying to protect myself from the same disaster that happened to Quirky and them filing bankruptcy.

  2. Is there a monthly cost per device?

  3. Can the GSM module have the WIFI module be connected together?

  4. Is there any Ethernet support (Quick search shows possible ENC module support)?

  5. The pricing per month per user. Why wouldn’t I just make 1 user and share that account? What benefits are there in the tier options of monthly accruing costs?

  6. Can I use any SIM card or do I need to use the one provided by Spark/Particle?

Thanks to everyone who knows these questions. :smile:

2

Hello those are great questions. I’m not from particle but If you send them a email to sales@particle.io they may answer your question better then anyone else. And to my understanding they do have a way to host your own instance of particle cloud but thats if you have 100,000 units :sunglasses:

3
  1. https://github.com/spark/spark-server
  2. For electron if you use the particle dataplan yes, 2.99$/month currently for the first 1MB
  3. You could place both photon and electron on same board if you place the antennas carefully.
  4. Not any official products that support wired ethernet yet
  5. Sharing a user between multiple users to avoid paying a license fee? that may not strictly be allowed :wink:
  6. Yes you can use other sim cards
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4

Were pretty good at answering questions, too :wink:

  1. the code is open source, and in no way locked in to the cloud. It's very useful to have, but not necessary. TCP/UDP can be used if you prefer a stand-alone solution.
    There's also the local cloud, though that could use an update or two. Then again, it's open source so you can change it at will.
  2. currently only for the electron, for which the pricing should be in the docs/website if you do a search.
  3. if you wire them up correctly, I wouldn't know why not.
  4. there's no word of that (at the moment)

Because they also like to eat... That said, the pricing system is currently under review and might change in the nearby future.
6) a search for "SIM" would've given you plenty topics saying it's very well possible to use your own :slight_smile:

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5

And to add to @Moors7

I would also say to prevent what you are fearing

If you want a company to live, you should give them something to live on.

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6

Thanks for all the answers.

Still doing research here and looking into it all, like not supporting direct https and need to use webhooks?

Can the Spark Server push new firmware code/Arduino Sketches?

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There is a third party HTTPS library.

And what exavtly do you mean there?

Do you mean the local cloud server? Not yet.
Otherwise yes.

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For example, I want to send POST data to AWS SSL 1.2 . The Esp8266 only supports SSL1.1 .

The server that was linked here:

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That is the local cloud server that @ScruffR was talking about and is open source for anyone to run and use. It does not support over-the-air updates at this time, but certainly could in the future.

I think the main issue would be setting up the compiler-linker for the large variety of platforms that people want to run. Currently setting up a local compiler-linker environment on Windows is vastly different that doing it on OS X or Linux, for instance.

With the Particle supplied cloud service, they just have to worry about their particular platform which is currently AWS and Linux based.

The differences between SSL 1.1 and 1.2 are mostly around flexibility in the crypto-suite. I don't know what the third-party HTTPS library uses exactly, but it was built around open-source and it would be easy for you to find out with some research.

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