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 4. Connecting the Sensors

In this chapter, you will learn to build a smart kitchen using a network of Photons. A smart kitchen consists of a smart inventory management system which is linked to a cloud-based data store.

An RFID reader connected to a Photon scans each product brought to the kitchen. A motion sensor connected to another Photon monitors the movement of the kitchen cabinet doors to keep track of the location and usage of each grocery item inside the kitchen. The Photon connected to the motion sensor sends the item location to the other Photon connected to the RFID reader, which, in turn, relays the consolidated information to the cloud store. Periodic and event-triggered data analysis of the cloud storage data sends SMS notifications to the user about the inventory status like product expiry, unused products, inefficient storage, and so on.

The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Overview of the project

  • Hardware components and setup

  • Communication between two Photons...