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)

Troubleshooting


When running some of our code on Particle boards, more so in the Core, it might occasionally not work as expected. Some of the problems you might face are listed here:

  • Particle CLI setup and other commands fail: This is usually due to Internet connectivity issues. Make sure your Wi-Fi is turned on, and the computer is connected to Wi-Fi.

  • Web requests fail to work: This problem arises due to the low memory available in Particle boards running old firmware, particularly the Core. The available memory is sometimes not enough for web responses to fit into. This problem can be rectified by updating the Core to the latest firmware, and slowing down the frequency of web requests. Flashing the latest firmware is discussed in Chapter 6, Hacking the Firmware.

  • Flashing new code takes a lot of time, in the order of minutes, while normally it should be less than 30 seconds. Sometimes, old code still remains after flashing—this problem is fairly common in the Particle Core. It may be due...