Spark has grown from a gleam in the eye of CEO Zach Supalla to a fully baked prototyping platform. These tiny boards allow you to make programmable Wi-Fi-enabled systems with a few lines of code and a few electronic connections. But Supalla wants to give you more.
The company has just announced the Spark Electron, a cellular-data enabled version of the Spark. It comes in 2G and 3G options with the boards costing $39 and $59 respectively. It comes with a SIM card and Spark will act as an MVNO. They’re offering 1MB of data for $2.99 a month and it will work in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
In short, this little board will be able to send messages to a central server, for example, almost anywhere in the world without Wi-Fi.
“We’re surrounded by cellular towers designed for our mobile phones and tablets,” said Supalla. “But those same cell towers can be used for all kinds of products. We hope to bring this technology to the masses and enable a whole new generation of connected products.”
The project launched today on Kickstarter and will ship this year.