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 3.  P2P and Local Server

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the two following popular network architectures for data transmission or communication between devices:

  1. Client-server

  2. Peer-to-peer (P2P)

You will also learn how to use these architectures in the Particle ecosystem.

We will develop a P2P application using Cylon.js (https://cylonjs.com/), a Javascript framework for robotics, physical computing, and IoT, to control our Particle device and an onboard LED with the keyboard. We will then describe how to set up the Particle server on your local machine for fast transmission of data across various devices, and we will end the chapter with a brief introduction to other protocols used in the IoT sphere.

The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Client-server versus P2P networks

  • Setting up a P2P network for Particle devices

  • Local server setup

  • Alternate protocols for IoT