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)

What is firmware?


Firmware is the permanent software programmed into a read-only memory of a computing device. Firmware, which is usually added at the time of manufacturing, is necessary to run user programs on the device. The firmware software provides control, monitoring, and data manipulation of devices or products. Typical examples of devices containing firmware are embedded systems such as traffic lights, consumer appliances, remote controls, digital watches, computers, computer peripherals, mobile phones, and digital cameras. The firmware contained in these devices provides low-level control for the device. Firmware code persists across power cycles (switching on and off, and back on).

Firmware is held in non-volatile memory such as ROM, EPROM, or flash memory. Most firmware can be updated. Common reasons for updating firmware include fixing bugs or adding features to the device. This is usually done by reprogramming the flash memory through a special procedure. Firmware, such as the...