Particle Announces Tracker One Hardware Reference Design, Launches New SoM and Tracking System
With an M.2 LTE CAT-1 module now available, and the reference design tracker to follow in July, Particle targets the asset tracking market.
Our friends at Particle has announced the launch of the Particle Tracking System, designed to offer customized asset tracking functionality powered by the company's low-cost development boards and modules — including a brand-new open reference design dubbed Tracker One.
"At Particle, our goal is to make it easier for you to connect the unconnected, no matter what you are building. Whether you’re deploying light electric vehicles for micromobility, monitoring protected lands for illegal forestry, or tracking the locations of important machines, vehicles, and other assets, we’re here to provide the infrastructure to power your IoT product," explains Particle CEO Zach Supalla.
"Today, we took a step in a new direction: going beyond the infrastructure layer of IoT by launching the Particle Tracking System. We want to tackle more of the challenges of locating mobile assets, which is one of the most common use cases for Particle and IoT more broadly."
Supalla claims that asset tracking has long been the most popular project among Particle users, going right back to 2015 and the Electron development board from what was then known as Spark. "What we’ve learned is that most of our customers were looking for a degree of customisation that an off-the-shelf asset tracker doesn’t offer," Supalla says. "Whether you’re tracking ambulances and fire trucks, rental equipment, or electric scooters – an off-the-shelf “GPS in a box” product won’t cut it.
"The Particle Tracking System is a new suite of products (both software services and associated hardware) that are designed to make it easier to deploy a customised asset tracking solution as quickly and easily as possible."
The Particle Tracking System is split into two segments: The Tracking Services platform, which includes mapping and geodatabase functionality along with a configuration service and application framework for firmware development; and the Tracker System-on-Module (SoM), which powers a field-ready tracker reference design dubbed Tracker One.
The Particle Tracking System is now live, with more information available from the company's announcement; the Tracker One won't be available until July, but the B523 SoM — a new IoT M.2 form factor SoM with Long Term Evolution (LTE) CAT-1 support for global cellular communication, along with Bluetooth 5.0 and 3G/2G fallback modes — is available priced at $69 a unit.