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)

Twitter and e-mail interaction project


The aim of the Twitter project is to get you accustomed to the development cycle using Particle Photon or Core. In this project, we will be building a connected application using Particle Photon and the Internet Button. The Internet Button has four programmable physical buttons, eleven RGB LEDs, and a three-axis accelerometer.

The Internet Button, used as an accessory to the Photon and Core, is powered by the Particle board, which fits snugly onto it.

The project that we are building here is quite simple. The idea is to use the Internet Button as a physical notification device as well as an input device, with two different ways to provide input-button press and "shake".

When we are done with this project, a tweet should be posted by shaking the Internet Button. The LEDs on the Internet Button will be turned on when a new tweet is posted this way. On pressing a button on the Internet Button, an e-mail will be sent out to your e-mail ID. On pressing another...