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)

Building the model car - hardware components


In this section, we will build a model car from scratch, but first, we will list the hardware required.

The following is a list of hardware components, with their required quantities, which are needed to build the model car:

  • Wheels (4)

  • L293D motor driver (1)

  • 65 Revolutions per minute (RPM) DC Right Angled motors (2)

  • Chassis (1)

  • Photon (1)

  • Li-Po battery (1)

  • 3-6V DC power supply (1)

  • Jumper wires (a few)

  • Breadboard (1)

The following is a brief description of some of these components:

Wheels

These could be any model car wheels suitable for use with DC motors. The ones we used for our project look like the ones shown in the following image:

Figure 1: Wheels

L293D motor driver

L293D is an Integrated Circuit (IC) which is used to drive direct current (DC) motors. It is capable of driving the motors in either direction. It is a 16-pin IC, as shown in the following image:

Figure 2: L293D motor driver IC

This motor driver can simultaneously and independently control...