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)

Cloud data analysis and SMS notification


In the Firebase data store, we store the item ID, the timestamp of storing the item inside a kitchen cabinet, and the latest timestamp when it was taken out. The ID of the cabinet is also recorded to keep track of the location of storage. As soon as an event of storing or taking out an item occurs, a quick data analysis is performed, and an SMS is sent to alert the user if the inventory needs attention.

For the purposes of this project, the SMS can be sent using third-party service providers that work over the Internet. Twilio (https://www.twilio.com) provides a REST API using which our Photon can send SMS to users. The integration of Twilio with the Photon is done using webhooks, and the webhook event is triggered by the Photon using Particle.publish().

The following is a list of some use cases which can be implemented by modifying the code in the previous sections:

  • Send an SMS notification to the user whenever a new item is placed on the shelf.

  • Send...