The Electron, an Arduino-compatible controller that just happens to have a GSM cellular connection built in. (credit: Particle)
Particle, a company that makes development kits for wireless Internet of Things applications—formerly known as Spark Devices—is preparing to ship a new board-based computer that will allow developers to use Arduino code to build mobile wireless devices based on GSM cellular connections. The Electron will allow developers to build Internet of Things devices that can connect nearly anywhere in the world where there's a 2G or 3G mobile wireless network.
Electron is the followup to Particle's Photon, a Wi-Fi based device with similar capabilities. Both Photon and Electron can use Arduino "sketch" code or code written in Particle's own development tool. And Particle offers a cloud service that allows developers to scale up their devices to full-production deployments of more than 100,000 devices.
Part of the appeal (and the business model) for Electron is that it comes with its own global data plan. Using an IoT SIM that works on cellular networks in over 100 countries, the Electron's basic data plan starts at $2.99 per month for 1 megabyte of data and 99 cents for each additional megabyte. That's not a lot of data, but Electron is intended mostly for "machine to machine" (M2M) applications, where relatively small messages are sent between the device and the cloud—not for things like streaming video or more consumer-type broadband cellular applications.
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