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)

Hardware components and setup


The following is a list of the hardware components and the quantity of each needed to build the smart kitchen project:

  • Photons (2)

  • Li-Po batteries (2)

  • 3-6V DC power supply (2)

  • RFID Reader module RFID-RC522 (1)

  • RFID tags (6)

  • Passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors (3)

  • Jumper wires (20)

  • Breadboards (2)

We will describe some of these components in detail, and explain the function they perform.

RFID reader module RC522-RFID and RFID tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, where two devices can transfer data between them using radio waves when they are near each other:

Figure 2: MIFARE RC522 RFID reader module (left) and RFID tag (right)

We use the RC522-RFID module from MIFARE (https://www.mifare.net/).

The RFID module needs to be powered by a 3.3V DC power source. It reads the tag ID numbers of the RFID tags near it, and passes them to the Photon to which it is connected. The tags are passive, and don't need any power supply...