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)

Overview of the project


We will set up the project in a medium-sized kitchen with a single entry. We monitor the items brought into the kitchen using Photons. Items that are brought into the kitchen are stored across three cabinets. The user has to follow a strict routine in order for us to keep the implementation aligned to the scope of this chapter. We assume that all grocery items have an RFID tag. After grocery shopping is done, the first thing to do is to scan each of the items using the RFID reader attached to the Photon placed near the kitchen entrance. After the entry of the item is recorded, the item is stored in one of the three cabinets. Thus, scanning and storing is a strictly ordered action pair. Similarly, when taking out an item from the cabinet, it needs to be scanned by the RFID reader as soon as it is out of the cabinet. The motion sensor connected to the doors of the cabinet monitors the inventory movement or usage. The Photon with the RFID reader, near the kitchen entrance...