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)

Data storage on the cloud


We use Firebase (https://www.firebase.com) for storing data on the cloud. Firebase is a backend-as-a-service provider which provides REST endpoints for data storage. We create webhooks to the Firebase REST endpoints to push data from the Photon to the cloud. We will pass the data to be stored in the Particle.publish() function at the time of invocation of the webhook event. 

The following screenshot shows Firebase project creation screen:

Figure 8: Project creation in firebase.com

We need to create a project in Firebase, but first we need to create an account at firebase.com. Point your browser to https://www.firebase.com, and create an account if you don't already have one. After the login/signup process, go ahead and create a new project as shown in Figure 8. Give a unique name to your Firebase project, and Firebase will generate a unique URL for your project upon creation, as highlighted in Figure 9. Keep the URL handy, as we will need it to create the webhook...