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Do you see convenient, off-line, user controlled development as important?

Wouldn't buy Proton or other Particle product without it
2
67%
Quite important
1
33%
Not particularly important
No votes
0%
Quite happy to rely on their compilation service remaining available
No votes
0%
None of the above fits my view
No votes
0%
By Sheepdog
#182014
Very frustrated with the promotional material regarding Spark/Particle Photon.

Finally managed to understand that "Spark" was the old name for the people behind Photon, and that it isn't out of Sparkfun.

Although Sparkfun seem very excited... or want to be seen as excited?... about the Photon.

But the vagueness about HOW DO YOU PROGRAM IT has me completely switched off.

As does the difficulty in finding any useful information about the product and programming it on the web. I opposed the Pi in the early days because of its lack (then) of an informed and helpful user community.

Photon may be great hardware, but I'm afraid that "If we build it they will come" doesn't work for me.

I finally found....
Particle Dev is a desktop application that allows you to work with local copies of your firmware files. However, internet access is required as the files are pushed to the Particle Cloud for compilation and returns a binary. i.e. This is not an offline development tool....
In other words: All of "your" code will be available to others, even if they are promising not to do anything bad with it.

And if they "go away", all of your hardware and the time you spent to master it are immediately compromised.

My plan? Ignore Proton and any further Proton marketing. Until a proper open-source, compile on your own system, development package is available. Of course, I may miss the announcement of the development package. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Now... where did I put my Arduino...? My Pi?
By jremington
#182018
The chances are that Particle products won't catch on and the company will disappear, or be swallowed up by another. In the meantime it is possible to have fun and learn while waiting for the market to make a decision.

There is a lot of interest in the ESP8266, now that full featured development systems have (very recently) become available, free for the download. Very, very cheap and apparently quite reliable.
By Mr.Paul
#182025
Offline compile is possible with Spark, though there does not seem to be any clear up to date easy how-to. It would be nice if they focused more on that, but their priorities to seem to elsewhere, focused more on usability to beginners. If they can't do everything, then that kind of focus makes some sense. Not everyone is concerned about their code being exposed.

I really want a better editor for most of these; I'm hoping CLion will be more amiable to cross compilers soon and fill in, it is a nice product. I've been playing with the spark, and it works reasonably well, but is beginner focused, with the information for more advanced usage a little more hidden (forums etc). If you are used to using a professional editor, then theirs sucks (as does Arduino)
User avatar
By ds18s20
#184401
I have to agree; I was very excited especially about their cell version but sadly the Electric Imp dream isn't dead yet. Even without the evidence you guys have observed it is often the case when one pushes so hard the "open source" for the truth to be exactly the opposite.

What Particle runs on their AWS or Google Compute accounts will never be available nor published for anyone to run on their own cloud vendor of choice. I guess without some unique element it's hard to get financing. That's the first question they ask on "Shark Tank" :(
By marmotxing
#184575
Particle has actually (surprisingly?) done a great job of getting all of the source code available on their GitHub page which is just github.com/spark (including the server and all apps). Also since the OP, SparkFun has put some great blog posts and tutorials out regarding the confusion with the name as well as how to develop for the Photon (web IDE, desktop IDE, choose-your-own). It really is a neat system, and it's no wonder SparkFun is really excited (though they share your concern about the "Spark" naming confusion).