Book Image

Learning IoT with Particle Photon and Electron

By : Rashid Khan, Kajari Ghoshdastidar, Ajith Vasudevan
Book Image

Learning IoT with Particle Photon and Electron

By: Rashid Khan, Kajari Ghoshdastidar, Ajith Vasudevan

Overview of this book

IoT is basically the network of physical devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data.. The number of connected devices is growing rapidly and will continue to do so over years to come. By 2020, there will be more than 20 billion connected devices and the ability to program such devices will be in high demand. Particle provides prototyping boards for IoT that are easy to program and deploy. Most importantly, the boards provided by Particle can be connected to the Internet very easily as they include Wi-Fi or a GSM module. Starting with the basics of programming Particle Photon and Electron, this book will take you through setting up your local servers and running custom firmware, to using the Photon and Electron to program autonomous cars. This book also covers in brief a basic architecture and design of IoT applications. It gives you an overview of the IoT stack. You will also get information on how to debug and troubleshoot Particle Photon and Electron and set up your own debugging framework for any IoT board. Finally, you’ll tinker with the firmware of the Photon and Electron by modifying the existing firmware and deploying them to your boards. By the end of this book, you should have a fairly good understanding of the IoT ecosystem and you should be able to build standalone projects using your own local server or the Particle Cloud Server.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Essentials of FreeRTOS and hardware resources


During the process of building the Twitter project, you may be baffled by some unexpected behavior of your program. It is easy to debug these anomalies if you understand some basics of how the operating system/firmware works. This knowledge will also help you effectively use the programming language and library features to write perfectly working code.

In Essential terminology Chapter 1, Introducing IoT with Particle Photon and Electron, we briefly mentioned that RTOS responds to events in real time, and is used in embedded systems. Real-time responses, along with its small memory and energy footprint, has made FreeRTOS a very popular choice for many other embedded chips as well. One of the major improvements in the Photon is that using FreeRTOS, the system code and application code now run in separate threads without compromising the efficiency of real-time responses. The user's application code is usually very small (a few KBs), but the system...