I am a software engineer for a test and measurement system manufacturer. The company I work for designs and engineers test systems for the wireless industry, among other things. I have backed the Tachyon project on Kickstarter in order to determine the viability of using the Tachyon as a test device for the systems we engineer. In order to make a connection to the cellular base station simulators that we use we usually use test SIM cards that have a know access security code that we can enter into the simulator so that the device under test (DUT) will be allowed to connect to the base station. For the Particle products that use the eSIM and don't have provision for an external SIM card, is there a way to obtain this security code so that we could use the Particle boards in a test environment?
No, that is not possible.
Most Particle devices that have a MFF2 SMD SIM are not actually an eSIM. They're a fixed SIM, just in SMD form-factor. When doing certification with a simulator, typically the SMD SIM is unsoldered and replaced with a 4FF adapter and a test SIM.
However M635 and Tachyon have a true eSIM. There may be a feature in the future for programming a test SIM into it, but this is not a scheduled feature at this time.
That is interesting. How are you all planning on going through certification testing on the Tachyon if you cannot reprogram or access those security codes?
We can program the eSIM. The question is whether it would be a general feature that allowed anyone to program an arbitrary SIM, a test SIM, we'd pre-load common test SIMs, or we would handle programming test SIMs as a service for customers going through certification.
Your situation is a little different, but in any case a decision has not been made yet.