Today, at the company’s annual Spectra conference, Particle unveiled several new hardware and software solutions that help designers take their IoT products from prototype to production. All About Circuits had the chance to interview Zach Supalla, founder and CEO of Particle, ahead of Spectra 2023 to learn about the new developments firsthand.
Goal: Make Production IoT Attainable
One of the biggest challenges that face designers of IoT products is getting their ideas from the prototype phase to the production phase. “75% of IoT projects fail,” said Supalla. “When I started trying to understand why this is, what I saw was a lot of projects failing in the transition stages. You have a lot of successful prototypes that then move into pilot and attempt to scale that product, but it just gets lost in the technical gobbledygook.” In Supalla’s eyes, the major reason for this is that, while prototyping is relatively easy, the amount of technical know-how required for custom/production hardware is overwhelming. For a prototype solution, tools like Particle, Arduino, and ESP32 are abundant and ready to use—but they don’t always translate into a production-ready solution. When this happens, designers need to essentially start from scratch to make something that’ll work in production—a task that is easier said than done.“There are so many things to do and so many things that can go wrong,” said Supalla. “You have to be simultaneously an expert at electrical engineering, embedded software, networking and connectivity, wireless networks, antenna design, security, cloud services, APIs, message, queuing, API design, and so on. There’s so many things to screw up, that people often end up in endless R&D cycles and can never get a product to market quick enough to make it economical.”
Reflecting on these issues, Particle set out to create solutions that make the prototype-to-production transition more tenable. Demonstrating this, Particle decided that the theme of this year’s Spectra talk would be “Simple to Start, Seamless to Scale.”
Monitor One
The second hardware solution to come from Particle today is Monitor One: a customizable IoT gateway development kit. According to Supalla, the impetus for Monitor One came from the idea that all IoT gateways were seemingly identical (in other words, a plastic enclosure with gateway electronics), yet so many different ones seemed to exist.
“We asked, ‘If all these products are the same, then why is anybody building them instead of just using off-the-shelf solutions?’ ,” said Supalla. “The answer is that while the physical presentation of this product is identical, every customer requires enough differentiation that they can’t use the off-the-shelf products. They need some kind of custom electronics.”
Monitor One seeks to serve this market for custom IoT gateway electronics by offering an easy pathway toward customizable IoT gateway hardware. Monitor One consists of two major pieces of electronics: a Particle-designed motherboard and an expansion board that plugs into the motherboard.
The motherboard houses all of the more universal electronics such as computing, power management, antenna, and RF. The expansion board, on the other hand, is where the customization takes place—allowing designers to modify the system to fit their needs, for example, sensors and peripherals.
Supalla explains “The idea for the customer is, if they were to use this to create their own IoT gateway, they would essentially customize the expansion board without having to touch the motherboard,” says Supalla. “We provide all the design files so that engineers can integrate with it, making the development of real production-level solutions easy to achieve.”
Like other IoT gateways, Monitor One comes wrapped in a plastic enclosure that users can customize to their liking through Particle’s partners.
Industry Impacts
As a company, Particle’s aim has always been to make the development of IoT solutions easier and more accessible to everyone and the announcements in this year’s Spectra are no different.
Concluding our interview, Supalla expressed his pride at the success rate. Monitor One seeks to serve this market for custom IoT gateway electronics by offering an easy pathway toward customizable IoT gateway hardware. Monitor One consists of two major pieces of electronics: a Particle-designed motherboard and an expansion board that plugs into the motherboard.
The motherboard houses all of the more universal electronics such as computing, power management, antenna, and RF. The expansion board, on the other hand, is where the customization takes place—allowing designers to modify the system to fit their needs, for example, sensors and peripherals.
Supalla explains “The idea for the customer is, if they were to use this to create their own IoT gateway, they would essentially customize the expansion board without having to touch the motherboard,” says Supalla. “We provide all the design files so that engineers can integrate with it, making the development of real production-level solutions easy to achieve.”
Like other IoT gateways, Monitor One comes wrapped in a plastic enclosure that users can customize to their liking through Particle’s partners.
As a company, Particle’s aim has always been to make the development of IoT solutions easier and more accessible to everyone and the announcements in this year’s Spectra are no different.
Concluding our interview, Supalla expressed his pride at the success rate.
