Plotting The Rise Of The Internet Of Things
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

At Octopart we have a good vantage point of stuff people are making, and we are here to tell you that, yes, the Internet of Things is a thing. To study this, we looked at a tiny piece of the story - a wifi chip designed specifically to cater to the interest in the Internet of Things. The chart below shows pricing trends and aggregate quantity in stock on Octopart.com for Texas Instruments' Simple LinkTM CC3000 product family:

cc3000

Texas Instruments released the CC3000 module in early 2013. The single-chip was a competitive offering at $10 (compared to pricier Arduino Ethernet modules, or Broadcom chips which were only available through high volume suppliers) and was frequently out of stock during the preview.

In June 2013, visibility started ramping up as Spark Core -- a wifi development board using the CC3000 -- was funded on Kickstarter, and Arduino libraries began to pop up on sites like HackADay and Adafruit. Pricing and availability held relatively steady during this period of learning and exploration.

In October 2013, the team at Technical Machine successfully crowdfunded Tessel -- a microcontroller that runs JavaScript which (you guessed it!) uses the CC3000 chip. It was shortly after this that the CC3000 price began creeping up, trailed closely by a big jump in overall stock levels. To us, this looks like suppliers reacting to the clear interest, and some of these early products starting their production runs.

The last few weeks have seen the price index drop (though not to pre-Tessel levels) -- which likely indicates some level of stabilization. We'll keep an eye on it. In the meantime if you are building an Internet of Things thing and want to tell us about it - what are you waiting for? Drop us an email or come find us at SolidCon in San Francisco next week.

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