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)

Alternate protocols for IoT


IoT devices are constrained in terms of computing and memory resources, and Particle devices are no exception. The REST architecture has been used extensively on the web for communication between clients and servers. Using the same architecture for IoT or resource-constrained devices is not very optimal. It leads to packet losses or memory being full, which result in unwanted behavior. The REST implementation is also process intensive for the IoT devices, thereby putting a heavy load on these tiny devices.

To overcome these issues, new protocols and architecture have been designed. We will be presenting briefly some of these new protocols, which are better suited for IoT.

MQTT

The first protocol we look at is called MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) (http://www.mqtt.org). Historically, the "MQ" in MQTT came from IBM's MQ Series message queuing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_queuing) product line.

MQTT is a publish-subscribe-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...