Particle Core

The Internet of Things is a hot topic, but there are few boards available that provide an easy introduction to it. The Core board from Particle —previously Spark— is one of them.

The Particle Core is a compact board built around a Cortex M3 MCU and the WiFi CC3000.

The MCU runs at 72 MHz and features 128KB of flash and 20KB of SRAM. The boards has 16 GPIOs, 8 of them analog, and the standard I²C, SPI, UART and JTAG ports.

The CC3000 SoC from Texas Instruments provides the standard WiFi 802.11 b/g with WEP, WPA and WPA2 security.

At USD39, the board is rightly priced.

The out-of-the-box experience is rewarding. The package includes a bread-board and an USB cable.

Configuring the board can't be easier thanks to the SmartConfig technology from Texas Instruments and the iOS or Android app developed by Spark.

Just use an iOS- or Android-based smartphone,
Download the app and launch it,
Enter the name of the local WiFi network (SSID) and the passphrase.
The app finds the Spark Core and configures it.

All the steps are described in this procedure.

Once the board is configured and connected, the same app launches Tinker, a remote-control for the board.

I've selected the GPIO D7 which corresponds to the blue LED and defined it as digitalWrite (left).

Touching the D7 button on the smartphone turns the blue LED on and off (right).

Because the commands go through Internet, the board and the phone can be located anywhere in the world, provided both have access to internet.

Hardware

The main board includes one RGB LED for status, one blue LED connected to pin D7 and two buttons for configuration.

Below, the standard pins map.

The RGB LED provides the status of the board based on its colours and speed of the blinking.

It is easy to get lost with so many colours and speeds combinations, hence the need for a handy help sheet.

The two buttons, RESET and MODE, allow to reconfigure the board, from soft reset to hard reset and factory reset.

Click to enlarge

Spark provides four different shields for the main Spark Core board:

an adaptor for standard Arduino shields,
a relay shield with 4 relays,
a debugging shield with a JTAG connector,
and a battery shield.

I haven't tested any of them.

Software

The major difficulty with the Internet of Things deals with the multiple environments to deal with when developing a project:

a first environment for the board, rather easy thanks to the Processing / Wiring / Arduino combination,
a second environment for the remote, either a website or an iOS- and Android-based smartphone, with a much more complex set of APIs,
and finally a third step called integration to make sure the board and the smartphone work together as expected.

Spark provides three sets of tools reviewed at the Particle Tools page:

an online IDE,
an offline Particle Dev IDE based on Atom,
and offline command line tools.

Pros

Powerful 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 MCU
Excellent out-of-the-box configuration and demo for iOS and Android devices
Online IDE for virtually any browser
Processing-based Wiring-derived environment

Cons

Command Line Interface and off-line IDE still in development
Too many blinking colours for the LED

Wrap-Up