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)

Troubleshooting


A real-life implementation of smart inventory management can have many challenges just like any typical wireless ad hoc sensor networks. Here, we highlight a few of the challenges you might face to make your project experience almost glitch free:

  1. When there are multiple motion sensors and multiple RFID tags all working together, messages don't transmit reliably due to a high load on the network infrastructure (routers, network switches, and so on) as well as the microcontrollers and servers, causing packet drops. To troubleshoot such issues, a programmer should have a thorough understanding of the network environment, and the messaging software should be set up with the right values for parameters like QoS.

  2. Most IoT devices use sensors at remote locations, and run on batteries, since an AC outlet may not be available where the sensing is done. In this scenario, it makes sense to select devices and write code so as to minimize the usage of power. This can be done by studying...