>> HANDS ON WITH PARTICLE.IO PHOTON

I figured it was time to wipe the dust of this page and get back into the tinkering mindset again.

I came across a family of devices that I felt after letting the platform mature a little it finally needed to be looked at. In December 2014 - the $19 USD Photon device was unveiled - a result of a kickstarter campaign that eventually succeeded and the product commercialized. At first glance one may assume it is just another micro-controller; but in fact it isn't - it is much more than that. It is Arduino compatible and has a complete ecosystem for device management and firmware delivery, a custom cloud for interaction - not to mention a mobile SDK for building apps.

So; what about specs?

• CPU:   STM32F205 120Mhz
  Flash: 1MB
  RAM:   128KB
  GPIO:  18 mixed signal pins 
  OS:    FreeRTOS

Upon opening the package; the first thing we are told to do is visit their website:

particle.io/start

You then simply select your device (yes, they have cellular versions as well) and you get presented with a tonne of information about the device. Unfortunately their getting started assumes you have a breadboard, LED and mobile device handy - but there is nothing like good old USB and command line for setting up these devices for first use; always good to see what is going first hand.

First of all; you have to create an account on the cloud servers - simply visit build.particle.io/signup.

To setup the device over USB; you need to use the particle-cli toolchain which has a dependency on NodeJS - if you haven't installed it, visit the website and grab the latest version. To install the particle-cli toolchain, open a Terminal window and type the following:

• $ sudo npm install -g particle-cli

Full documentation exists on the website for the tool; for simplicity we will focus on setting up the device - connect the device via USB and open the terminal window and run the command particle setup. The console will look something like the following:

• $ particle setup
   _ __             _   _      _
  | '_ \  __ _ _ __| |_(_) ___| | ___
  | |_) |/ _` | '__| __| |/ __| |/ _ \
  |  __/| (_| | |  | |_| | (__| |  __/
  |_|    \__,_|_|   \__|_|\___|_|\___|
                   https://particle.io
  
  > Setup is easy! Let's get started...
  ? Hello Stranger! This seems to be your first time here.
  ? What would you like to do? Login
  > Let's get you logged in!
  ? Please enter your email address user@host.com
  ? Please enter your password ********
  > Successfully completed login!
  
  > I have detected a Photon connected via USB.
  ? Would you like to continue with this one? Yes
  ! The Photon supports secure Wi-Fi setup. We'll try that first.
  
  ? Found "Photon-xxx". 
  ? Would you like to perform setup on this one now? Yes
  
  > Obtained magical secure claim code.
  > Hey! We successfully connected to Photon-xxxx
  > Now to configure our precious Photon-xxxx
  
  ? Would you like to manually enter your Wi-Fi network configuration? Yes
  ? Please enter the SSID of your Wi-Fi network: {SSID}
  ? Please select the security used by your Wi-Fi network: {security}
  ? Please enter your Wi-Fi network password: {password}
  > Here's what we're going to send to the Photon:
  
  > Wi-Fi Network: {SSID}
  > Security: {security}
  > Password: {password}
  
  ? Would you like to continue with the information shown above? Yes
  
  > Obtaining device information...
  > Setting up device id xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  > Requesting public key from the device...
  > Setting the magical cloud claim code...
  > Telling the Photon to apply your Wi-Fi configuration...
  > The Photon will now attempt to connect to your Wi-Fi network...
  
  > Configuration complete! You've just won the internet!
  ! Network not ready yet, retrying...
  > It looks like your Photon has made it happily to the cloud!
  
  ? What would you like to call your photon? xxxxxxxxx
  
  > Your Photon has been bestowed with the name xxxxxxxxx
  > Congratulations! You've just won the internet! 

Of course; follow the prompts and enter in the details specific to your newly created account and the appropriate SSID, security and password for your wireless network. The setup isn't extremely complicated; but the goal is to obtain the device id, so that you can associate the device with your account on the particle servers. Of course I masked the values here for my own security :)

One of the nifty things that attracted me to the platform was the concept of being able to not require physical access to the device to deploy firmware updates. The Photon device has a fully integrated OTA (over the air) update mechanism - which is great for remote management of devices. I will leave it up to you to read the documentation on using their web based IDE, you can also download a local IDE for deployment over USB, but that defeats the purpose of OTA firmware updates.

I put together a simple sketch that will print some logs to the Serial console:

Using the web based IDE I was able to confirm the compilation of the sketch and deployment it to the Photon device without any issues - the LED's flashed as they should and it was now time to check the results of my labour. Keeping in mind it was based on Arduino; I figured we could use the same old technique for accessing the Serial communications using the Terminal window:

• $ screen /dev/tty.usbmodem1411
  Hello World
  counter 1
  counter 2
  counter 3
  counter 4
  counter 5
  counter 6
  counter 7
  counter 8
  counter 9 

As expected; the device was printing a counter every second and was happily doing exactly what it has been told to do without any issues. This only touches a very small part of what the platform can do - I was specifically interested in seeing how their OTA firmware update worked; not so much wanting to use their cloud platform.

My next project will be to tinker a little more and post sensory information to my own servers - not to mention play around with their assortment of wireless modules they have available as well. It will also be interesting to see how the device handles from a performance point of view and exactly how much of the memory available in the micro-controller can actually be used by the user sketch.