What this book covers

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.