The particle computer is the platform of the sensors i’m working right now. It is developed by the university of Karlsruhe and features a variety of different devices. All of them are based on the PIC family of microprocessors by microchip.

Currently there are two devices you can buy: uPart0140ilmt and Particle 2/29. There were some other models like Particle 2/00 and Particle 2/10 that have been discontinued from production. Currently i’m working with the 2/29 devices but i also have access at some 2/10 particles and i have worked with them too. Both of them use the RFM TR1001 chip for rf communications and the bandwidth they communicate is 125kbps. The internal memory is 128kb program flash, 4kb RAM and 1kb EEPROM and the external 32kb EEPROM for the 2/1x devices and 512kb flash for the 2/2x. All of them feature the CONAN connector, a 21 pin connector with I2C, SPI, serial, parallel bus, analog input lines, interrupt input lines and digital I/O lines. Also the 2/2x devices have a real time clock.

They come with the particle base system, a runtime that offers some functions for communication using awarecon. Awarecon is a custom communications stack made for the particle computer that was designed to achieve complete synchronization between all motes all the time. All of them can communicate with a computer using a usb bridge or the xbridge. Both of them are sensors which run a special program just for communications. The first has a usb connector that connects to a computer and the second has an ethernet interface and can encode packets and send them over udp.

From the programmer’s point of view there is the libparticle library for c/c++ but bindings for other languages like c#, java, python and ruby are available. Also, you can find a lot of examples at the software section at particle computer’s homepage.

What i realized after working with them is what i write at my first post about sensors at my blog: murphy’s law is applicable 100%. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Problems can arise from nowhere and debugging is very difficult. One common problem is that the software that comes with them doesn’t run when you put service pack 2 at windows xp. No idea why, it just doesn’t run! And this is a computer problem, problems at the sensors are much more difficult. Another thing i found out is that the services that are provided by the particle base system are very limited. I made a basic threads implementation but i need to do more tests before i release my code. There is a page here that explains everything, if you want access email me for the password.

I think that’s all i could say as an introduction to the particle computer. More stuff can be found at the particle computer’s homepage.