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)

Programming the car with the Electron


The Electron is a prototyping board from Particle which has a built-in GSM module. Using the GSM module, the Electron can connect to the internet using a 3G/2G network.

In the projects we have seen so far, the controller and the car are on the same Wi-Fi network. In this section, we explore a scenario where there is no common network between the controller and the model car that needs to be remote-controlled. How do we control the car remotely in this situation? We replace the Photon in the model car with the Electron. This allows the car to be in a completely different region and still be controllable remotely.

Putting it all together (again)

Connect the circuit as shown in the next schematic diagram. The connections are similar to the ones you did for the Photon-based projects. The Electron has to be connected to a Li-Po battery, which is included in the package when you buy the Electron. Make sure the battery is completely charged before mounting it...