Kickstarter is a wonderful idea. For those who do not know anything about the online platform, Kickstarter allows you to browse the thousands of ideas, projects, and prototypes that people or startup companies have had, with a view to supporting them. If you choose to support the project, your pledge will be allocated to the company, supposedly managed by Kickstarter, and all the funds will be released once the project has been successfully funded.
This concept allows companies to gain the necessary funding from individuals, with a promise that once the product is available, the funder will have what they initially paid for in the funding round shipped to them. This, of course, is the ideal situation, but for myriad reasons, the results are usually less consistent, especially for technology-based projects. I do admit that over the last few years, I have funded many projects and have only received around half of them. The rest of my funding disappeared into a black hole of mismanagement and untruths.
Of course, I did receive some of the hardware that I initially funded, but most of these were half-baked at best, with some of them being completely dysfunctional. Has this stopped me going onto Kickstarter to browse the ‘latest and greatest’ new invention? Of course not. The platform is like a drug to anybody involved in technical education and the maker community.
This backstory allows me to introduce something I recently saw on the platform. It caught my eye because it is being offered by a well-known IoT company (www.particle.io) that I have used before for various IoT-based monitoring systems. The reason I chose to use products released by Particle is that I believe they have done IoT correctly. Unlike many other companies that simply offer devices that can connect to a network, and then forcing you to use an online system for communication and data storage, or making you put together your own server to handle the data, Particle provides a complete IoT ecosystem.
Once the hardware has been purchased, it is registered as yours on their network. Logging in to a portal allows you to not only monitor your device, but also to configure it, and even to provide OTA updates to both your user code and the firmware. This makes the higher cost of the hardware worth it compared to buying a common ESP-32 or similar for IoT projects.
Particle’s Tachyon is a single-board computer using the same form factor as a Raspberry Pi. It has eight processing cores, embedded UFS memory for OS and code, an AI accelerator, Wi-Fi 6E, and 5G cellular connectivity. Battery management circuitry is also onboard, making this a truly ‘configure and forget’ type of deployment.
There is, however, one big pebble under the mattress making the purchase of one of these SBCs a hard sell if you are based in South Africa.
For cellular connectivity, Particle piggybacks off local companies in each country they sell hardware. This IoT data is usually a small amount, for example, the IoT controller I have controlling my home consumes less than 30 MB of data per month, and this is with an update frequency of once per second. Looking at the list of countries released by Particle, most have a subscription charge for IoT data between €6 and €8 for the standard 2 GB package. Not so in sunny SA. The charge to use the Particle cellular service is a whopping €149, which blows the device out of contention when being considered as the basis for an IoT project. I can only believe that this high charge is due to local players not wanting to be bothered by a system like this. After all, the cost of 2 GB of data in SA is around the R50, far from the R2900 listed on Particle’s website.
To support a cellular-based IoT industry, more needs to be done to address the cost and connectivity issues plaguing local players, and until that is done, SA will continue to remain at the back of the pack.
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