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)

Local server setup


As we have seen earlier, Particle provides a cloud-based development environment for building and deploying code to its devices. The Particle cloud is also the gateway through which all communication to and from the Particle device happens. This works well if you have a good Internet connection, however, it may become slow and unreliable if you have a slow connection. This becomes a problem in certain situations where you need to access the board, for example, to read values from it in real time. Your application may require real-time performance, which the cloud-based setup may not be able to guarantee.

By using the Particle cloud, data from your board located in your living room is sent to the server on the Internet, and data comes back from the Internet server to your home router that is also in the same living room. All the traffic over the relatively slow Internet adds latency to the data flow, even when the devices are in the same local network.

The problem just discussed...