Hi,
I built Smartfire BBQ (http://smartfirebbq.com/products/smartfire-bbq-controller) on top of Particle. First on Photons and then moved to P1 modules about a year, and have over a thousand in the field.
The Good
- Particle are well setup to service commercial customers, with an online wholesale portal with transparent pricing and lead times
- The team are genuinely friendly and trying to do well for customers while keeping an eye on longterm company sustainability. Seems a decent balance is going on.
- They have a crack team of hardcore firmware folk, years of effort has gone into the firmware and most the gremlins have been long buried.
- The customer forums are active, kicking and very well monitored and participated in by the Particle folk. There are some genuine heroes who seem to work 24/7 helping folk with libraries like @peekay123
- Fleet management is decent, you easily can roll your own like we did by watching particle subscribe mine
The Not Ideal
- No BT integration, we had to go to P1 and roll our own
- Particle keys occasionally get corrupted and requires you to RMA the customer’s device so you can replace it at your cost because the Particle cloud doesn’t have a neat way of redirecting the device to a non-secure portal. Our priority is customer devices working, communicating BBQ temperature status updates isn’t top secret so not particularly worried if a MITM attack occurred while updating the device keys with a fresh set
- Particle webhooks aren’t standards based and if they see an error code returned they’ll queue another attempt, and after N failures they’ll mark the webhook as bad and it’ll be taken offline. So even if the request was invalid make sure to return a 200 OK. It doesn’t make sense, its flawed, but just roll with it and use AWS HTTP gateway to massage everything into happy as larry 200’s on the response.
- Particle is a fairly limited platform in terms of cpu and memory, I wish it had a bit more grunt so we could connect to MQTT over TLS etc as I’d prefer to connect it to Google IoT cloud etc.
- Pricing is on the expensive side, it’s going to be commercially tempting to move to the likes of ESP32 over the next 2 years unless a new Particle generation comes out that is more competitive against a rapidly maturing competitor. Particle P1 is ~$11 and Microchip RN4870 for BT is another $9, whereas the new kid on the block ESP32 is $4. There’s whitespace there.
The Damn Ugly
- The wifi stack only supports B/G/N operating in 20Mhz bandwidth setting. When I raised this topic the surprising claim was that this hadn’t been seen as an issue. It’s a massive issue as modern wifi routers default to 40Mhz so after around 15 mins the Particle will be dropped from the wifi network as the ‘conversation’ drifts into the other 20Mhz of spectrum that the Particle isn’t aware of. This causes angry customers to jump on forums and the phone to complain that the product doesn’t work. I’ve personally spent hundreds of hours explaining to customers how to change their wifi router setup, for the technology challenged folk this has involved me setting up a calendar time to remotely connect to their computer via teamviewer to change their wifi router settings myself. Something to be careful of, and potentially proactively put into the setup professional services of your product if you have the opportunity to do so. On our consumer electronics product we don’t have that opportunity.
Summary
Overall, quite happy and would recommend for current commercial projects.