The Photon is a $19 tiny Wi-Fi development kit for creating connected projects and products for the Internet of Things. It's easy to use, it's powerful, and it's connected to the cloud.

The tools that make up the Photon's ecosystem (and come along with the board) are designed to let you build and create whether you're an embedded engineer, web developer, Arduino enthusiast or IoT entrepreneur. You'll be able to write your firmware in our web or local IDE, deploy it over the air, and build your web and mobile apps with ParticleJS and our Mobile SDK.

The board itself uses a Broadcom WICED Wi-Fi chip (one that can be found in Nest Protect, LIFX, and Amazon Dash) alongside a powerful STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller. It's like the Spark Core, but better! The WICED chipset is much faster than the original CC3000 in the 'Core and also supports SSL and Soft-AP mode.

This is the Photon without breadboard headers connected, with castelated pads it can even be attached to a surface mount PCB.  If you're looking for a pre-assembled version, click here!

If you're looking for a version with a breadboard and USB cable, click here for the Photon Starter Kit.