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)

Communication between the Photons


In the projects described so far in this book, we have been dealing with only one Photon device, which acted as the central processing unit for the project. In the real world, we often come up with solutions that require multiple processing devices.

In this section, we will build a small prototype which will help you send data from one Photon to another. The code for this project will be written in the online Web IDE provided by the Particle hosted at https://build.particle.io. We will use the Particle.publishmethod to publish events to the Particle cloud. Any device which has subscribed to this event by using the Particle.subscribe method gets a notification, and the corresponding event handler function is executed. The name of the event can be set from the code, and additional data can be passed from the publisher device to the subscriber device as part of the event message.

In this example, we will create a system consisting of two Photon devices which...