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


The projects in this chapter require some physical assembly of parts. The electronic aspect is similar to the projects in earlier chapters of this book.

Common precautions to take and the pitfalls to watch out for while implementing these projects include the following:

  • Make sure the VoodooSpark firmware is installed on your Photon and that it is functioning by building the example given in the Setting up a P2P network for Particle devices section in Chapter 3, P2P and Local Server.

  • While connecting the L293D motor driver, watch out for correct pin numbering of this IC, where, unlike the Particle devices, pin numbers are not labelled. They need to be discerned from a reference dot or notch on the IC itself. If you are new to handling ICs, see https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/integrated-circuits#ic-packages for information on how to find IC pin numbers.

  • The Photon/Electron, L293D motor driver IC, and motors may be powered using different power sources. We normally connect...