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)

Chapter 2. Fire Up Your Kit

In this chapter, you are going to build a Twitter and e-mail interaction application. The Twitter and e-mail project aims to give you hands-on experience with the Photon board, Particle cloud, and writing code using ParticleJS (https://docs.particle.io/reference/javascript/), a library to interact with Particle devices and the Particle cloud. We'll start the chapter with a brief list of the essential features of FreeRTOS (http://www.freertos.org/), the Photon's operating system. This will help you understand the functionalities in this project, and to troubleshoot unexpected behaviors. This is followed by detailed steps for setting up the Photon and the Internet Button to communicate with Twitter and send an e-mail.

The list of topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Essentials of FreeRTOS and hardware resources

  • Flow diagram for the Twitter project

  • Getting the Photon online

  • Twitter and e-mail interaction project

  • Troubleshooting

To build the Twitter and e-mail...