[Ductapemaster]

<Shameless plug> The company I work for, Particle [1] has set out to do exactly that, and we have built up quite the community of developers and enterprise customers who needed to solve this problem. Our founder started the business after trying to build an IoT product and realizing how much value there was in the common underpinnings of every IoT product.

Our offering comes down to three things:

1. Pre-certified hardware modules (open source [2]) that support WiFi or Cellular in a few form factors.

2. An on-device OS (also open source) that handles communication in the background and abstracts away the hardware using an Arduino-like API.

3. A cloud-based "command center" (closed source) that allows you to link up your backend services with events flowing to and from your devices via webhooks, manage over the air updates, and see connectivity metrics across your fleet. No data is stored - just ferried between your devices and the other end of the pipe that you configure.

Oh, and you can buy our devices off-the-shelf in small volumes and get them up and running in a few minutes!

[1] https://www.particle.io

[2] https://github.com/particle-iot

[throwaway9d0291]

How would you compare your WiFi products to alternatives like the ESP32?

I see that your dev kits are more expensive than pure ESP-based boards but aside from Argon (which is an ESP32 with an extra processor), it's unclear why. Photon, P0 and P1 all have an STM32F205 which is much less powerful than an ESP32 yet the P0, which is a raw module, is more expensive than the retail price for an ESP32-PICO-KIT, which is a full dev board. The Cypress chip doesn't look to be anything special either.

Is there something I'm missing?

[Ductapemaster]

From a cost perspective, our hardware designs are more expensive because they are highly integrated (6 to 8 layer PCBs, blind and buried vias, dense component packing, etc) and carry certifications from the FCC and CE, among others. This saves you an expensive certification process when you scale your product, enabling you to get to market faster.

Our core products are our cellular modules, as the certification burden on them far outweighs the process for WiFi modules (PTCRB, carrier certs). While we definitely have customers that use our WiFi products in a production capacity, generally our customers use our WiFi portfolio to prototype in their offices and then migrate to a cellular module for their end product. Saves cost and complexity when you just want to get something working, and our DeviceOS allows you to use the same or similar publish APIs regardless of the underlying connectivity technology.

When you purchase one of our modules, you are buying into a proven and tested platform that is guaranteed to work with our cloud. You just need to make your hardware and set up your backend. We handle the rest. Additionally, we don't make a lot of margin on our hardware - it's not the business we are in.

In terms of processing power, we target applications that don't need to crunch numbers. A great way to describe our platform is a "pipe" that takes your data from some sensor out in a field and drops it in your cloud backend/database. Our best applications are ones in which someone needs to answer "where is my device?" or "how is my device functioning?". In these verticals, it's all about data transmission rather than processing. Often these devices are battery powered and geographically hard to access. They spend a lot of time asleep, and when awake want to consume as little energy as possible.

The IoT landscape is vast, and we have narrowed in on a set of solutions that work well with specific verticals. Our product isn't a fit for every situation, as you have pointed out. For the ones it does fit for, we can provide significant value as a platform.

[michaelt]

There's a school of thought that says if your target customers are mass producers, it doesn't matter how much your development kit costs. Because any professional engineer on a work project can afford a $30 dev kit, and a good portion a $3000 dev kit.

Of course, not everyone follows this line of thinking; due to their cheap, accessible hardware there are innumerable people with Arduino/ESP8266 experience, which might lead people to attempt mass produced projects with them.

[throwaway9d0291]

> Of course, not everyone follows this line of thinking; due to their cheap, accessible hardware there are innumerable people with Arduino/ESP8266 experience, which might lead people to attempt mass produced projects with them.

That was my experience exactly. I've been working on an embedded project for work and since I'm so used to using the ESP32s at home, I chose them without much thought for work as well.

[numlock86]

> Pre-certified hardware modules (open source [2]) that support [...] Cellular in a few form factors.

> [2] https://github.com/particle-iot

Wait, what? Open source cellular modules? Can you point me to something? All I could find in the linked repo was some helper utility to address a couple of modules.

[Ductapemaster]

The hardware designs are open source, but we utilize off-the-shelf hardware including cellular modems which inherently are closed source at their core. I wish there was an open source modem design on the market!

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Hmmm. About 9 months ago I was looking to add IoT functionality for a large industrial device. I looked at Particle briefly, but TBH, they seemed more focused on the "maker" market than industrial applications and that would definitely be a negative in the market the product is going to be sold into.

I don't know if I missed it before, but the products I'm seeing on your site now really look more suited to what I need than they did back then. I've done a lot of network programming and IoT work, but since connectivity is such a minor feature of the machine, it would definitely be preferable to have a smart module to abstract away most of it for me.

Oh, well. There's always next time :-)