The good news is it comes with onboard Wi-Fi (the Cypress BCM43362 Wi-Fi chip) and USB support, and it costs as little as $19. It’s also compatible with the Arduino…

There’s web-based IDE, JavaScript SDK and command-line interface. And to help get things done through The Cloud, each Photon also gets its own “webhook” in the Particle Cloud (to manage firmware updates, for example).

The company writes:

Based on Cypress’s WICED architecture, the Particle Photon Series combines a powerful STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller and a Cypress Wi-Fi chip. This keeps the footprint small but the function broad.

A Photon Kit, including the devboard, a mini-breadboard, a USB cable and a few basic components, costs $29 (currently sold out on the Particle website).

Specs

The microcontroller specs include: the STM32F205 120Mhz ARM Cortex M3, 1MB of Flash memory, 128KB of RAM and 18 mixed-signal GPIO and advanced peripherals

For Wi-Fi, the spec is as follows: it supports single band 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n, and Open, WEP, WAPI, WPA and WPA2-PSK WiFi security modes. There are also Ultra low power sleep, stand-by and stop modes. Finally, the company claims wireless data rates of up to 65Mbit/s.

Interesting. May be worth exploring.

Photon Series

Note that, to be precise, the Photon Series has four models: the single unit already m,entioned, Photon in Trays (surface mountable for machine assembly ), the PO module (with a smaller footprint and preprogrammed with Particle firmware), and the P1 Module (as P0 but with a built in antenna and UFL connector).

You can read an article on a Google blog about hooking the Google Assistant to the board – The new maker toolkit: IoT, AI and Google Cloud Platform.

You can see the end result pictured, using the Assistant via a Google Home device.