Particle's Multi-Radio Muon Gets a Raspberry Pi-Like Redesign, Both Variants Now Available
An original twin-GPIO header design has been discarded in favor of offering compatibility with the expansive Raspberry Pi ecosystem.
Particle has announced general availability of its Muon multi-radio Internet of Things (IoT) development boards, designed around its M-Series system-on-modules — and has tweaked the design in order to offer compatibility with Raspberry Pi-style Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) accessories.
"Muon [is] Particle's new multi-radio development board, designed to simplify and revolutionize connectivity," the company says of its latest development board. "It's the first and only product to combine a full suite of popular radios — built into the M-SoM are cellular, Wi-Fi, BLE, GNSS, NTN satellite (depending on M-SoM inserted), and then the Muon additionally brings LoRaWAN and Ethernet."
Particle first showed off the Muon back in February 2024, at the same time as announcing the M-SoM family of multi-radio system-on-modules. Back then, the carrier featured two female general-purpose input/output (GPIO) headers on either side of the board — much like the BeagleBoard.org BeagleBone family. By June it had changed its mind: what it's put on sale now is instead inspired by the Raspberry Pi, moving to a single 40-pin male GPIO header at the top of the board.
That new form factor isn't just for aesthetic purposes, either: the GPIO header is designed to mimic the Raspberry Pi pinout, meaning compatibility with a wide variety of HATs and other accessories from the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. The board also includes a dedicated Quectel KG200Z LoRaWAN module, a Texas Instruments TMP112A temperature sensor, Ambiq Micro AM1805 real-time clock (RTC) with watchdog capability, and an Ethernet port powered by a WIZnet W5500.
The rest of the functionality depends on the M-SoM installed, with the North American version of the board coming bundled with the M-SoM M404 — delivering an Arm Cortex-M33 core running at up to 200MHz, a Quectel BG95-M5 LTE-M cellular modem with 2G fallback, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reception, and a Realtek RTL8722DM with Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (BLE) and dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. There's 3MB of RAM and 2MB of program flash available for the user's own firmware, which — naturally — can make full use of Particle's powerful Internet of Things platform for data transit, management, and over-the-air updates.
"Once you’ve built your prototypes and are ready to scale up your operation," the company promises, "you can do so with ease by switching to the M-SoM, our production-grade system-on-module. Simply port your firmware using the hardware abstraction layer on our Device OS and transition seamlessly from the Muon to the M-SoM, reducing your bill of materials & speeding up development time."
The Muon LTE-M/2G variant for North America is now available on the Particle store at $69.95, a $20 discount over the planned $89.95 retail price; a European variant with an M-SoM M524 supporting LTE CAT1/3G/2G is also available for those seeking connectivity across the pond, priced at $84.95. Both models come with the Muon carrier board, M-SoM, GNSS antenna, wideband cellular antenna, and Wi-Fi/BLE antenna, but no LoRaWAN antenna; a larger bundle that adds a plastic case, LoRaWAN antenna, USB cable, SMA to IPEX cable, and a 3250mAh battery is available at $79.95 for the North American and $94.95 for the European variants.