Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Called Tachyon, and aimed at AI edge processing, it is designed to run Ubuntu across its four 1.9GHz Arm cores, three 2.4GHz cores and single 2.7GHz core.
Particle describes itself as a “full-stack IoT platform-as-a-service” company, and Tachyon is intended to run with its services, but it can also operate on its own.
“Much like it doesn’t make sense to run your own server farm in 2024, it also doesn’t make sense to build IoT infrastructure from scratch. If you’re deploying a product at scale, you should rely on other companies for infrastructure that falls into the category of ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting’ – a term we’ve borrowed from Amazon Web Services,” company founder and CEO Zach Supalla told Electronics Weekly. “We don’t want to force anyone to use our IoT infrastructure – you could do all of that on your own, and if it’s a hobbyist project and part of the experience is learning and challenging oneself, that’s great. If a user wants to DIY everything, they’re welcome to, and they can uninstall the Particle service. We want to provide a great product experience and then demonstrate to users that we’re a good technology partner with infrastructure that they can rely on.”
On board are is 4Gbyte ram, 64Gbyte flash, a two lane NVMe compatible PCIe Gen 3 bus, USB-C 3.1 PD with DisplayPort, four-lane DSI for displays up to 1,200 x 2,520 and two four-lane CSI interfaces for cameras up to 25Mpixel.
“Tachyon is footprint compatible with Raspberry P 5i, and its 40pin connector is compatible with Raspberry Pi HATs. The display, camera, and PCIe connectors are also compatible, so that accessories designed for Raspberry Pi 5 will work with Tachyon,” the company said. “Software written for Raspberry Pi 5 that is generic for the Debian architecture will in almost all cases, run directly on Tachyon, and in other cases may require slight modifications – such as to use the built in AI accelerator on Tachyon.”
A lithium-ion battery charger has been built-in, and the board can be powered by USB-C, a DC input or a lithium-ion battery.
Find the Particle website here
Note: the company is launching its computer through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. For the uninitiated: this is not a retail website, delivery is not guaranteed. That said, some companies who are likely to deliver use it is a marketing platform.
