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)

Moving the car with gestures


It would be interesting to be able to move the model car with hand gestures. In this section, we explore the possibilities of the same. An additional piece of hardware is needed to track hand movements or gestures and convert them to events that our code can use. We can use a Leap Motion (https://www.leapmotion.com/) controller for this purpose. The Leap Motion controller uses two monochromatic infrared cameras and three infrared LEDs. The device can track up to 10 fingers in real time, and transmit the data to a computer using USB.

The following image shows a Leap Motion controller in use:

Figure 10: Leap Motion controller

How it works

We use the spherical radius of palm output parameter of the Leap Motion controller as the input which drives the model car. We do this by continuously monitoring the spherical radius value as seen by the controller. When the palm of your hand is stretched, that is, the spherical radius is large, the car starts moving, and when the...