September 4, 2020

The Particle Photon

I bought two of these back in 2016 and they have been sitting around ever since. In many ways, this is all wrong, except for the hardware. The Website is full of glitz and hype and the concept is "cloud based" development, which is the LAST thing I am interested in. But the hardware on my two boards is interesting.

It looks to me like I have what they now call a "Gen 2" unit. This now sells for $20. The heart of it is an ST STM32F205 chip, which is a Cortex M3 ARM that runs at 120 Mhz with 1M of flash and 128K of ram.

There is also IoT hardware and a micro USB connector. In theory we should be able to repurpose this thing and use a locally hosted toolchain, but odds are we won't be able to get our hands on the Wifi library. The thing to investigate would be access to SWD pins and the ability to use the ST-Link with these boards.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]