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)

Setting up a P2P network for Particle devices


Out of the box, Particle boards run the stock firmware which integrates with the Particle cloud; thus, Particle devices are in the client-server mode when you buy them. It is not possible to set up a P2P network with the stock firmware shipped with Particle boards, and hence we need to flash a custom firmware onto the device, that supports the P2P protocol. VoodooSpark (https://github.com/voodootikigod/voodoospark) is a customized firmware build for Particle devices, which allows remote access of the firmware API using a TCP connection.

Flash the VoodooSpark firmware

The VoodooSpark firmware can be deployed very easily using the Web IDE at Particle Build (https://build.particle.io). Copy and paste the code available at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/voodootikigod/voodoospark/master/firmware/voodoospark.cpp in your Web IDE editor window, and click the Flash button (). This will burn the custom firmware onto your Particle Photon.

Connect the Particle...