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The Photon from Spark IO looks super small. Are there smaller wifi enabled microcontrollers available that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE?

uwe
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    It's impossible to answer this kind of question and that the answer will stay relevant for a substantial amount of time. Today it's chip X, tomorrow chip Y... – Omer Dec 30 '14 at 05:11
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    For a tiny arduino with wifi look at tiny-circuits. Not the cheapest option or easiest for prototyping. But quick and easy to get up. https://tiny-circuits.com/tiny-shield-wifi.html – lxx Jan 01 '15 at 08:12

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From your question it implies that the Spark IO use the Arduino IDE - it's not. It has two different IDE's, one is web based and the other is downloadable. In addition, it's not an Arduino per-se. It is based on the Wiring library, which is similar to the Arduino library but not exactly the same. And of course the MCU is not Atmel, but that is also the case with Intel's Galileo board.

As to the size question in hand - my believe is that the Arduino products are designed for prototyping, so the size of the product is less important. This is the case for several reasons:

  • Costs - the different Arduino products are pretty expensive for mass production.
  • Peripherals - the Arduino boards come with different peripherals (such as the FTDI chip) which will probably be omitted in an end-user product, and which makes its size larger.
  • Pins - almost every (official?) Arduino product comes with pre-built male/female header pins, which are excellent for prototyping but not for production, because of the large vertical space they take.

There are many more reasons, but you get the point.

When moving to production with an Internet of Things product, it makes sense to fabricate your own PCB, and design it with a small Atmel chip you used for prototyping (such as ATtiny85) and small Wifi chip, such as the ESP8266. This is an example for such fabricated PCB, although the size is not the 'smallest' possible.

However, for beginners, or a one-time project, it would absolutely make sense to use a pre-fabricated Arduino product, in a small scale that could provide both easy coding capabilities, various libraries and a WiFi included. For that purpose, the Spark IO seems to be at the bleeding edge at the moment - but you never know what will be there tomorrow...

Omer
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  • thanks for the detailed answer and the great example, very helpful! – uwe Dec 30 '14 at 20:55
  • Hi Omer thanks for this useful post - I am looking at making a prototype and it's useful to understand that the production hardware will be different - I was worried about the height of those vertical pins and if they were necessary. I would like to prototype something where the software made is not throw-away so I guess spark (now particle) looks like a good way to go – Dominic Sep 04 '15 at 17:48