Internet of Things (Part 1)

Introduction

In my personal time, I enjoy learning about and playing with electronics. For a job I program software. Over the years I have brought these two passions together in my use of internet of things devices to control and monitor my world.

“The Internet of things is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.”

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things)

My projects have consisted of adventures like the following:

• Server Room Temperature Monitoring
• Bathroom Door Status Monitoring
• Internet Light Switches

I have used numerous IoT platforms in my hobby time but have recently become aware of and utilized the tools and hardware offered by Particle (https://www.particle.io). They claim to be the only all-in-one IoT platform. I will outline their products and tools as I have interacted with them.

Particle Hardware

Particle offers many different types of hardware that cover various connection requirements. These are in the categories of Wi-Fi, Cellular, Bluetooth, and Mesh. You can see their full suite of offerings at https://store.particle.io/products. Their products also include kits and accessories which is how I started.

My specific hardware choice has been and continues to be the Photon (https://store.particle.io/products/photon). This tiny IoT device connects via Wi-Fi and integrates with the Particle ecosystem. The specs for the Photon are:

• Cypress BCM43362 Wi-Fi chip
• STM32F205 120Mhz ARM Cortex M3
• 1MB flash, 128KB RAM
• 802.11b/g/n
• Full specs at https://docs.particle.io/datasheets/photon-datasheet/

Particle Software

Along with any purchase, Particle devices come with access to their Device Cloud and this access is free for up to 100 devices.

The Device Cloud consists of many very helpful tools to get your IoT project developed and launched like:

• Device Management (https://console.particle.io)
• Over the Air Firmware Updates (https://build.particle.io)
• REST API (https://api.particle.io)

In addition to the Device Cloud capabilities Particle also offers a VSCode extension called Particle Workbench (https://docs.particle.io/quickstart/workbench/) that works very well for me first because that is what I use as an editor in my programming and second because it is packed with options for me to control my Particle devices.

Summary

Over the next months, I will detail the projects outlined above with code examples, project photos, and overall demonstration of how these solutions have been fun to work with and have solved real-world problems that I have in my day-to-day life. Stay tuned.