I used to be young and foolish. I’m not young anymore, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to say is that I’m constantly amazed by how far and fast technology has evolved in my own lifetime. Take single board computers (SBCs) for example (cue “travelling back in time” audio and visual effects…)
I remember the first time I saw an SBC, circa the mid-to-late-1970s. It was advertised in the British Practical Electronics hobbyist magazine. This SBC was presented as an unpackaged printed circuit board (PCB) that looked to be around 9” x 12” in size. The board was jam-packed with dual in-line (DIL) lead through-hole (LTH) integrated circuits (ICs). It had an 8-bit microprocessor with a clock speed of a few hundred kHz, 1kB of RAM, 2kB of ROM, a hexadecimal keypad along with a couple of toggle and pushbutton switches, and a handful of 7-segment displays to reflect the contents of the memory, address, and data busses.
I drooled with desire over this bodacious beauty, but I was an impoverished student at that time, and its £99.99 price tag was totally beyond my means. I remember feeling sorry for myself and thinking I would never be able to afford a computer of my own. If only young me could see old me sitting in my office today. I’m surrounded by computers of every shape and size. Young me simply wouldn’t believe his eyes (“What happened to all our hair?” he would say).
As an aside, I also remember reading the construction articles in the magazine and thinking that their authors must have size-16 brains with “go-faster” stripes on the side. Now I know the ghastly truth, because I find myself to be a regular monthly contributor to the same magazine 45+ years later, and I rarely have a clue what I’m waffling about. “It’s a funny old life,” as they say.
Another thing I remember is how things we take for granted these days used to be so much harder. For example, a friend and I had a side gig in the form of a small two-man company towards the tail-end of the last millennium. This was circa 1998. We wanted to augment our website with the ability for people to order things and pay using their credit cards. This turned out to be incredibly confusing, frustrating, and time-consuming, involving many players (including banks and other financial institutions) who were learning (and making it up) as they went. Doing the same thing today is easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Until relatively recently, a similar situation occurred for people wishing to create the “things” part of the internet of things (IoT); that is, the devices found at the extreme edge where the internet meets and greets the real-world. Trying to connect these devices to Wi-Fi was… interesting, to say the least (there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garb, let me tell you). Similarly, attempting to connect these devices to the cloud by cellular means was beyond the ability of most individuals and small companies.
All this started to change around 10 years ago when a small startup called Particle appeared on the scene with their Spark Core “Wi-Fi for Everything” Kickstarter. The idea behind the Spark Core was to create an Arduino-compatible, Wi-Fi enabled, cloud-powered development platform that made creating internet-connected hardware a breeze. Particle also provided the Spark Cloud—a network of servers that supercharged the capabilities of every Spark Core with a suite of cool software-enabled features.
Suffice it to say that the Spark Core Kickstarter was an outrageous success, receiving pledges of $567,968 against their modest $10,000 goal. Of course, there’s a world of difference between creating a one-off prototype and the full-up production of a product. Many startups have been overwhelmed by their initial Kickstarter successes, finding themselves unable to satisfy their backers. This certainly wasn’t the case with Particle, which used this first project as a stepping stone to even greater success.
In 2015 Particle announced their Electron “Cellular Dev Kit with Global Data Plan” Kickstarter. As noted on the Kickstarter: “The Electron is a tiny development kit for creating cellular-connected electronics projects and products. It comes with a SIM card and an affordable data plan for low-bandwidth things. Plus, it’s available for more than 100 countries worldwide!”
The fact that the Electron came with a SIM card and a data plan “out of the box” was a game-changer. Pricing varied a tad by country, but in the US, Canada, Europe, most of Latin America, and a few others, for example, the price was only $2.99 a month for 1MB of data (approximately 20,000 messages), with $0.99 for each additional megabyte, and… wait for it… wait for it… no contracts. All you had to do was open the box, power up the Electron, register your account with your credit card, and you were “off to the races,” as it were.
Once again, this Kickstarter proved to be a tremendous success, receiving pledges of $578,478 against its $10,000 goal.
Since that time, Particle has gone from strength-to-strength, firmly establishing itself as an integrated IoT Platform-as-a-Service that helps businesses connect, manage, and deploy software applications to connected devices, from edge to cloud and back again. Over 240k developers and 160+ Enterprise customers are building on Particle, from fast-growing startups to Fortune 100 companies.
Just a few months ago, I posted my Something M-azing This Way Comes column, in which I introduced Particle’s M-Series system-on-modules (SOMs) that support Wi-Fi, Cellular, LoRaWAN, and Satellite (NTN / Non-Terrestrial Network) communications—again, out of the box. As I said in that column, “The guys and gals at Particle provide everything their customers need, from embedded software to cloud software, with connectivity, networking, and data automation in between.”
Could things get any better? I’m glad you asked. The answer is, “You Betcha!” I was just chatting with Zach Supalla, who is the Founder & CEO of Particle. Zach explained how all of Particle’s previous products were based on microcontrollers targeted at customer devices with modest processing requirements and low data desires (in terms of transmission speed and size). Now, they’ve decided to step up their game with a new high-performance microprocessor-based system with an integrated AI accelerator and 5G connectivity.
I guess it comes as no surprise to hear that their new Tachyon “Powerful 5G SBC with AI Accelerator” Kickstarter received pledges of $513,585 against its $10,000 goal. I tell you what—let’s take a moment to look at a couple of images, and then I’ll waffle on some more.
Front isometric view of the Tachyon (Source: Particle)
Tachyon board next to clipper card for scale (Source: Particle)
A PCIe M.2 hat connected to a Tachyon with a ribbon cable (Source: Particle)
High-speed MIPI display and camera ribbon cables plugged into the Tachyon’s DSI and CSO connectors (Source: Particle)
Off-the-shelf terminal block connector hat mounted on top of a tachyon makes connecting to the Tachyon’s 40-pin header easy (Source: Particle)
At the heart of the Tachyon is the Qualcomm QCM6490—an SoC that takes the power of a Snapdragon and presents it in an IoT-friendly package with upstream Linux support and a ten-year longevity guarantee. This is the same chipset that powers the Fairphone 5, and the same tech under the hood that powers the Nothing Phone (1), along with a variety of smartphones from Samsung, Motorola, Xiaomi, and Oppo.
The QCM6490 features an octa-core Qualcomm Kryo CPU, making the Tachyon one of the most powerful SBCs on the market. In addition, the Tachyon has a Qualcomm Adreno 643 GPU and a Qualcomm Hexagon 770 DSP containing an AI accelerator capable of delivering 12 TOPS. It can drive 4K displays, consume high resolution video from two cameras, and run powerful AI/ML models to detect objects in video streams, classify sounds in audio streams, and process natural language.
As with Particle’s previous products, the Tachyon comes equipped with a SIM card and a data plan to get you up and running out of the box. Not only does the Tachyon come with 5G connectivity operating at up to 2.5Gbs (with LTE fallback and an integrated custom cellular antenna!), but it also comes pre-loaded with Particle’s embedded EtherSIM with free cellular telemetry and an optional low-cost data plan.
Sending gobs of data? Don’t worry, the Tachyon has a Wi-Fi 6E connection for blazing fast connectivity over your Wi-Fi network, again with a built-in antenna.
In a crunchy nutshell, the Raspberry Pi-compatible Tachyon SBC makes it possible for anyone—whether shipping at scale or for personal use—to create remotely-deployed AI-enabled IoT products. This kind of capability has previously been available only to smartphone and PC manufacturers and wasn’t readily available to the average person or business. To be honest, I’m still struggling to wrap my brain around the fact that this kind of capability is available at all!
What say you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share about any of this? As usual, I look forward to casting my orbs over your captivating comments, insightful questions, and sagacious suggestions.
