Introduction to Products

Developer Devices

Starting out with a single development kit and a single account you can use the Particle cloud features like:

• Publish and Subscribe.
• Functions and Variables.
• Over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates.

However, you are limited to 100 developer devices per account and you can only flash code to a single device at a time.

Products

As you scale beyond prototyping, you will almost certainly want to use a Product. A Product is a management schema that allows users higher-level control over groups of devices. In the self-service plan you can scale to 250 devices in a Product.

Products allow a number of additional features over developer devices:

• Team members, so multiple accounts can work with your Product.
• Product firmware, so you can upgrade your fleet of devices automatically instead of one-by-one.
• Device groups, so you can subdivide your fleet of devices into groups with different firmware or features.

You can start developing with a Product for initial prototyping and testing and later import your Products to an Organization when you scale to Enterprise quantities.

Enterprise Features

Once you move beyond self-service to an Enterprise plan, you get features such as:

• Organizations, allowing you have multiple products with hierarchical access controls and billing.
• Team access controls, allowing you to grant specific permissions to team members.
• Fleet health, for monitoring the status of your fleet of devices.
• Intelligent OTA, allowing fine-grained control of the fleet OTA process.

1. Add Devices to Your Products

For most Products, you pay for all of the device cloud charges from your own account. You then either handle your own recurring billing with your customer, or build the cost into the cost of your Product. The device cloud charge includes 3 MB of cellular data per month.

When you order devices in tray or reel quantities from the Particle wholesale store, you'll get an email with the Device IDs in your order. By importing the list of device IDs to your Product you associate those devices with your Product.

Learn More About Devices in Products

2. Initial Device Setup

It's possible to just send out devices from your order to your customers without programming them first, however this will slow down the initial connection process and use additional cellular data upgrading your product firmware and Device OS over cellular.

Instead, it's common to program the devices before you send them to your customer.

Programming devices can be done:

• Using JTAG/SWD. More common on an assembly line, also the fastest method.
• Using USB. More common for small numbers of devices.
• OTA. Less common for cellular devices as it can use a lot of data.

3. Device and Claiming

In addition to being part of the Product, devices typically need to be claimed to an account. For cellular Products, it is common to create a single account that all devices are claimed to. It's also possible to use two-legged shadow customers, for both cellular and Wi-Fi devices.

Learn more about Device Claiming

4. Development Workflow

Learn more about the Development Workflow