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)

Custom firmware


The stock firmware provided with Particle devices is good for prototyping but, when building a product for production, the firmware needs to be optimized for a particular function that the Particle device will need to perform over an extended period of time. Firmware that can cater to this need is called custom firmware.

Custom firmware is a modified version of the official firmware. This is usually created to enhance the features the device would otherwise have. You get Particle devices pre-programmed with an official firmware. This can be replaced with builds of the firmware modified to provide other functions and support for other types of programming. Often, when the hardware device has to be deployed for a specific use case in production, the firmware may need to be stripped down to the functionalities one actually needs, to free up memory, for example. With the official firmware, Particle supports programming in the C language. Sometimes, the programmer is skilled in...