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)

Getting the Photon online


The Particle Photon and Core have built-in Wi-Fi modules, a Microcontroller, I/O Pins, Buttons, and LEDs. You will be using the Photon's buttons to configure the modes of operation of the Photon and Core.

If you hold the Photon or Core board such that the USB connector is at the top and the buttons are facing you, then the Mode/Setup Button is the one on the left, and the Reset Button is to the right. If you look closely, these buttons are also labelled right on the board, as shown in the following image:

Figure 3: Spark Core and Particle Photon

The RGB LED is in the center of the Photon and Core, between the Mode/Setup and Reset buttons. The color of the RGB LED determines the current mode of operation. All the color codes are explained at this link: https://docs.particle.io/support/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-support/photon/.

Setting up the Photon or Core

The Photon and Core boards can be set up and used with an iPhone or Android application as well as by using...