Page 26 - Programming the Photon Getting Started With the Internet of Things

Air pollution monitoring

Environmental sensing
Smart logistics

Location tracking

Health monitoring

More and more IoT devices are becoming available on the market these days, such as
smart thermostats or Philips Hue lamps, which allow the user to control home heating

aspects or mood lighting. With this big boom in the IoT, makers and hobbyists have
become more intrigued with creating their own smart projects, and the Photon board
allows them to do just this while keep the cost down to a mere $19—one of the least
expensive boards on the market today.

Because so many makers and hobbyists are creating new IoT projects, it makes sense

to create a simple framework for both the hardware and software that provides a simple,
easy-to-use system for any level of skill. This is why the Particle team has created such a
system based on the popular Arduino software, transforming what could be quite complex

technology into an open-source product that is easy to use for every user.

Particle Cloud

The hardware part of the framework is the Photon board itself, which is based on the

popular Core module funded through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. The Photon
board has been designed to be backward compatible with the Core, and as such, most of
the experiments in this book will also work with the Core.

Particle has created a software framework for the hardware that allows users to interact

their hardware with other technology and devices over the Internet, and the two elements
work hand in hand easily. An IoT device that uses the Photon might turn on a consumer
device using a relay or similar circuitry. In this case a user might access a webpage or a
mobile app that has a button to switch the device on or off. When the user clicks the
button on the webpage, it then sends a message or string of data to the Particle cloud

service, which then forwards that message on to the Photon board and switches on the
device. If the Photon board had some sensors connected to it, then the cloud system would
simply work in the reverse order, where instead of the Web service sending information to

the cloud when you clicked the button, the Photon board would send the sensor
information to the cloud and then to the Web server to be displayed on the Web. The
whole Particle framework makes this work seamlessly without being too complicated for
end users—all you have to do is register your Particle Photon board with your Particle
cloud account and you are ready to go.

The Photon Board