Devices made by Particle (the IoT company formerly known as Spark) are one of the most popular IoT platforms for hobbyists and professionals alike. This fast-paced guide will help you develop IoT-based applications using two of Particle's popular boards—the Photon and the Electron.
Chapter 1, Introducing IoT with Particle Photon and Electron, introduces you to IoT and common hardware and software used in building IoT projects, and lists popular IoT boards. The chapter then introduces Particle, the IoT company, and describes its three main products—the Photon, the Electron, and the Core.
Chapter 2, Fire Up Your Kit, gives a brief introduction to the workings of FreeRTOS, the operating system of Photon. The chapter goes on to help you build a Twitter and email-interaction project. You will learn to code for Photon using ParticleJS in the web-based IDE called Particle Build.
Chapter 3, P2P and Local Server, compares two popular network architectures used in IoT projects and shows you how to set up a P2P network for Particle devices. This chapter also describes how to set up a local server to make communication between devices faster. Finally, we will introduce you to other popular protocols and architectures used in IoT.
Chapter 4, Connecting the Sensors, shows you how to build a smart kitchen using a network of Photons with cloud-based data storage, analysis, and notifications using webhooks.
Chapter 5, Of Cars and Controllers, teaches you how to use Photon and Electron to build a connected model car that is capable of being controlled remotely using a keyboard. We will also show you how to modify this project to control the car by hand gestures using a Leap Motion controller.
Chapter 6, Hacking the Firmware, talks about the role of firmware in the Particle devices and shows you different ways to obtain and deploy the firmware on them. We will also list the advantages of custom firmware, taking the case of the VoodooSpark custom firmware as an example.
This book describes various IoT projects that you will want to try out. In order to successfully execute these projects, the following software needs to be installed on your computer:
Linux (preferable) or the Windows operating system.
eBook reader helps you open the eBook version of this book on your computer for ease of copying code snippets to and from the book to your code editor on the computer.
A text editor, such as GEdit (Linux) or Notepad++ (Windows), to edit the code locally.
A web browser to access and use a web-based code editor and to download software.
Node.js (https://www.nodejs.org)—a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
Particle CLI (https://docs.particle.io/guide/tools-and-features/cli/photon/)—a command-line interface from Particle.
Particle driver for Windows is required only if you're using Windows OS. For more information, see https://docs.particle.io/guide/getting-started/connect/photon/, and look for the Installing the Particle driver section.
Cylon.js (https://cylonjs.com/)—a JavaScript framework for robotics, physical computing, and IoT.
ARM GCC—an ARM variant of the GCC compiler tool chain for the C language.
make, a command-line utility that compiles and builds binaries from source code.
Git, a distributed version-control system.
The Obtaining firmware by building from source section of Chapter 6, Hacking the Firmware, describes how you can obtain ARM GCC, make, and Git for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
DFU-Util (http://dfu-Util.sourceforge.net/)—a utility to download and upload firmware to/from devices connected over USB.
The Burning firmware using the DFU-Util method section of Chapter 6, Hacking the Firmware, describes how you can obtain DFU-Util for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
This book is for developers, IoT enthusiasts, and hobbyists who want to enhance their knowledge of IoT machine-to-machine architecture using Particle Photon and Electron and implement cloud-based IoT projects.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The driver is called spark_core.cat."
A block of code is set as follows:
{
"event": "twitterFetch",
"url": "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json",
"requestType": "GET",
"headers": {
"Authorization" : "Bearer XXXXXX"
},Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ particle setup
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select the Advanced tab."
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