Particle Jumps Into Mesh Networking With Three New Boards (And Lower-Cost LTE)

Board maker Particle.io announces their 3rd generation product, Mesh — a trio of controllers that, as the name gives away, are designed for mesh-networked applications.

The company has promoted wi-fi enabled prototyping through its original release, the Core, and advanced that with the Photon and the LTE-enabled Electron. The new boards offer those same options along with Nordic nRF52840-enabled Bluetooth 5 and NFC. The new lineup consists of the Argon (providing wi-fi through an Expressif ESP module), the Boron (offering a sensor-optimized flavor of LTE), and the Xenon (just mesh and Bluetooth-5 capable).

With the new boards, the LTE data plan for the Boron gets a boost too — now offering 3GB of data for $2.99 a month (up from 1GB).

The design of the boards is shifting slightly too, moving to the barely larger Adafruit Feather form factor, which opens the new boards to the growing lineup of sensor and component-control add ons.

With the announcement and launch event happening this week, the company is now taking pre-orders as it fine-tunes the hardware and takes notes from the community. They plan to ship in July.

We attended the Mesh launch event in San Francisco last night. Photos below.