Page 46 - Programming the Photon Getting Started With the Internet of Things

community.

Uploading Your First Application

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the Particle Build IDE, the next best thing to

do is just write a simple application so you can understand a bit more how the process of
flashing a program to your Photon board works. You will dive into more code later on, but
just to give you an idea we will use one of the examples provided with the Particle Build

IDE.

First of all make sure your Photon board is connected to the Particle cloud. It should
be blinking cyan, which indicates that it’s connected to the Particle cloud. In the Particle
Build IDE navigate to the Examples header and look for a program called Blink An LED.
Click the program, which should now be displayed on the main editor page. Alternatively

you can quite easily create a new application and copy the following snippet of code into
the active tab. Here is the code that we will use for our first example.

//D7 LED Flash Example
int LED = D7;

void setup() {

pinMode(LED, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
digitalWrite(LED, HIGH);
delay(1000);
digitalWrite(LED, LOW);
delay(1000);

}

The next step is to select your Photon to flash your code to. Click the Devices icon in
the navigation bar on the left side, and you should see a list of connected devices to the

Particle cloud. Next to your Photon name, select the star icon next to it to highlight that
device as the active one to program. If you only have one device, this will automatically
be selected and you can skip to the next step.

Now that we have our code, click the Flash button, which will send our application

firmware to the Photon wirelessly. If the flash was successful, the Photon LED will flash
magenta and you should see the on-board blue LED blinking every second. Not the most
amazing piece of programming wizardry, but nevertheless you now know the basics of
using the Particle’s Build IDE environment.

Under the application header you should see a button that says Fork This Example.