PARTICLE Boron Cellular LTE Connectivity Development Kit for IoT Projects and Prototyping

If you are planning on learning about IoT or developing with it, these devices by Particle.io are the place to start. They give you the device, antenna, protoboard and a few parts to make your first app. They email you instructions that get you working in no time. Their development support is great with lots of examples. Their Boron device that I purchased uses cellular communication for places where wifi is not available. Their other devices use wifi. There are free online and desktop IDEs to program it. They even keep the on chip firmware up to date for you; no need to flash new ublox versions. This is much better than the Arduino cellular devices.

Device is super fun and has so much potential. A great learning platform for getting into IoT. I have no professional experience and have already developed a proof of concept for remote actuated valves for our dewatering company using blynk and the web IDE. Fun stuff.

Great product. In response to review about data. If you are smart with your code will not charge you high data charges. Plus you can always add a sim with unlimited data.

Nifty product line, but be aware that the Boron LTE is aimed to make money via required auto-pay subscriptions and data overages that cannot responsibly be avoided. The getDataUsage() function is “Not supported on Boron LTE,” and the 24 hr lagged data reported in Particle Console is an inadequate tool for an allegedly advanced product. The point being that such limitations are NOT accidental.Once subscribed for $2.99/mo (The 3 “free” months require a subscription to activate presumably to pay for the induced overages), you only get 3MB /Mo. Neither fact is even mentioned on the Amazon product page.FYI, each power cycle of the device consumes at least 1.44kB, and it automatically sends 122 B pings every few minutes. Plus, any Particle firmware updates, device flashes, etc... are all metered data, since the Boron is prohibitively difficult to flash over usb. So in essence, the 3 MB only covers Boron’s monthly overhead data, and not much of the useful data you may wish to send.

This is the best solution for an all-in-one IoT cellular connection. Easily connect projects to the cloud and control them easily from a web page or cell phone. Particle has the best platform!.

This is a high quality board that makes it easy to get started with cellular IoT devices, and even build a product with it. I was confused at first because it didn’t come with a Particle SIM card like their Electron kit does, but quickly realized there’s an e-sim card soldered to the board. Fortunately, there’s still an onboard SIM slot if you want to use a different cell provider like Hologram who may offer a better rate. Particle does do things to make it easier for you to just stick with them though. The Boron is easy to program either with updates over cellular from their online programming environment, or over USB with a command line interface if you want to save cellular data.Now for the longer story. I have very mixed feelings about Particle. If you pay for their products, you will generally receive high quality hardware and good forum/customer support. However, they are essentially a cloud company who sells hardware, and they make most of their money catering to larger scale products and companies, while still making their platform reasonably available to hobbyists. The Boron, Argon, and Xenon boards came out as their Gen 3 hardware, and were initially advertised and sold as a new “Particle Mesh” system that would finally make IoT mesh networking easy and reliable. After a rocky start with unreliable setup through their app and a generally pretty poor user experience for the first year plus, they did finally get the thing off the ground and working (for the most part).Tragic ending: In early 2020, Particle announced that they would no longer support their mesh networking, stating that it was taking too many resources to develop and not being popular enough (I suspect that this was partially due to Particle’s failure to make it as easy or reliable as they made it sound). They pulled the plug at the end of 2020, essentially leaving us users who supported them in the initial stages and bought mesh networks high and dry. (Previously set up mesh networks will continue to function, but the option to set up or reconfigure networks is gone) (this is a problem given the unreliable and buggy experience where you may have to delete networks and start over again). Boron and Argon boards continue to work just fine as standalone cellular and Wi-Fi boards, but the Xenon board which only had mesh wireless capabilities is pretty much useless in their ecosystem now, since they never developed support for updating the board over Bluetooth. I think this is a terrible business practice from a large, well established company. It’s common for small startups to fail and when I buy their products I know there’s no guarantee that the company will even exist in a few years. However, this is on a completely different level and I expect much more from a company like Particle. They will give you store credit (if you bother them), but it’s a measly $5 per Xenon you purchased while shipping alone ran me $30 for a small order on their website. I do hope to use my Xenons as Bluetooth/ANT+ boards, but it will be a lot more work to develop without them running the Particle OS anymore.Sorry for the long review, I do absolutely recommend the Boron as a standalone connected board. It’s not that I’m just salty about mesh deprecation; rather, I want to possibly help someone else who’s confused by all their advertising they (still) haven’t taken down in a lot of places talking about mesh capabilities that simply don’t exist anymore due to an unfortunate decision made by the company.