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)

Summary


The aim of this chapter was to introduce you to the world of warehouse management using different sensors, and usage of a cloud-based data store. The chapter talked about the challenges of setting up an IoT environment and a project setup. There are innumerable tools, both software and hardware, out there in the market, so a programmer needs to have the acumen to choose the right one. Experiencing and troubleshooting these types of challenges trains a programmer to select the right protocols and tools for a given project requirement, and to build more advanced projects.

This chapter focused on the communication aspect of a Photon. We demonstrated the communication between two or more Photons using the publisher/subscriber model, where one device communicates with the other device by generating events and passing data. We also discussed communication between a Photon and Internet-based services using webhooks.

In the next chapter, we will use the key concepts covered in this chapter...