Learning IoT with Particle Photon and Electron

The IoT has, in recent years, become quite popular and an everyday phenomenon, primarily due to IoT-related hardware, software, accessories, sensors, and Internet connections becoming very affordable and user friendly. An explosion in the availability of free Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) have made programming and deployment of the IoT really simple and easy. Thus, IoT enthusiasts range from school kids, hobbyists, and non-programmers to embedded software engineers specialized in this area.

Let's learn about a few terms that we're going to be hearing all throughout this book, and whenever we work with IoT hardware and software components:

Connected smart devices need to communicate with each other and exchange large volumes of messages between themselves and the cloud. To ensure near real-time response, smart bandwidth usage, and energy savings on the resource-constrained IoT devices, new protocols have been added to the traditional seven-layer network model (OSI model:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model). The following table shows the major OSI network protocols and the IoT network protocols suitable for various smart, connected devices.

The next table lists the main specifications of popular IoT boards. These specifications are the basic details one has to consider while selecting a board—its specifications in terms of processor and speed, memory, available communication modules and ports, and IO pins. Also, while selecting a board, one has to analyze and match the project's requirements with the available boards, so that the right board is selected for the application in terms of fitment and performance.

It is important to know what kind of cloud service we will be dealing with, and whether our board has open standards and allows us to use our own personal service easily, or whether the board-provided service needs some manipulation to use in the current project.

The first company started by Zach Supalla in 2011 was known as Hex Goods, and it sold designer products online. In early 2012, Hex Goods was shut down, and Zach started a second company called Switch Devices, which dealt with connected lighting. Switch Devices was then renamed Spark Devices. The name Spark was used as it provided a double meaning to the founders. Spark stood for spark of light and also sparks of inspiration.

In early 2013, Spark transformed to an IoT platform for engineers and developers. The name Spark also did not last long as the founders felt Spark created confusion for a lot of users. There exist 681 live trademarks that include the word Spark. Apart from the number of trademarks, there are some other great, unrelated software and hardware products employing the name Spark in them—some of them being Apache Spark, SparkFun, and Spark NZ. It has been reported that a lot of people logged on to Zach's #spark IRC channel and asked questions about big data.

The name Particle was finally chosen, as it gave plenty of room to grow in terms of products and offerings. Particle, in scientific terms, is a single discreet unit within a larger system. The name draws a parallel with the mission of Particle—the company which provides development kits and devices as single units used to build the greater whole of IoT.

We'll cover Particle IoT products in depth, and see how and when they perform better than other IoT development boards.

Today, the most recurring problem with all existing IoT prototyping boards is that of connectivity. In order to connect the existing boards to the Internet, additional components such as Wi-Fi or GSM modules have to be attached in the development environment as well as in production. Attaching external devices for communication is cumbersome, and adds another point of failure with frequent issues such as Internet unavailability, intermittent network connectivity, and so on. This leads to a bad experience for the developer.

Developers have to frequently (re)write code, deploy it onto the device(s), test, debug, fix any bugs, rinse, and repeat. The problem with code deployment with existing boards is that the boards need to be connected to a computer, which means for even the smallest code update, the device/board needs to be connected to the developer's computer, either by moving the computer to the device (which may be located at a not-so-easily accessible location) or vice versa. This poses a problem when the device, after an update at the developer's site, has to be placed back in its original production environment for testing and debugging the new changes. This means large turnaround times to load new code into production.

Particle provides products that have built-in Wi-Fi modules or GSM modules, which help in easy connection to a network or the Internet, with support for Over-The-Air (OTA) code deployment. This removes the hassle of adding extra modules on the prototyping boards for connectivity, and it also allows pushing code or testing/debugging onsite. As previously mentioned, one of the important features that differentiates Particle products from other devices is the Particle device's ability of deploying code over the air. New code can be deployed onto the device or burnt, as the process is called in embedded systems parlance, via REST API calls, which makes it very convenient to provide updates. This feature of Particle products helps with a faster code release cycle and testing/debugging.

Particle offers a suite of hardware and software tools to help prototype, scale, and manage the IoT products. It also provides the ability to build cloud-connected IoT prototypes quickly. If you're satisfied with your prototype and want to productize your IoT design, no problem there. It helps us to go from a single prototype to millions of units with a cloud platform that can scale as the number of devices grow.

The popular Particle hardware devices are listed as follows:

The Photon and the Core are bundled with Wi-Fi modules, which help them connect to a network or the Internet without adding any extra modules.

The Electron has a 3G/2G GSM module, that can be used to send or receive messages directly or connect to the Internet.

The firmware for the Photon, Electron, and Core can be written in a web-based IDE provided by Particle, and the deployment of the firmware code to the device is done over the air. Particle also offers SDKs for mobile and the Web to extend the IoT experience from the devices/sensors to the phone and the Web.

A detailed comparison between Photon, Electron, and Core is given in the next section.

The Spark Core was the first IoT prototyping board released by Spark (now known as Particle) in a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $567,968 from 5,549 backers. The Spark Core is an Arduino-compatible, Wi-Fi enabled, cloud-powered development platform that makes creating Internet-connected hardware a breeze.

Figure 1: Spark Core

The technical details of Spark Core are as follows:

The Spark Core is priced at $39 USD.

The Photon was built considering the feedback received from Core users. Thus, the Photon is the successor of the Core, and is more powerful than the Core in terms of CPU and memory.

The Photon can be ordered with or without headers, which means it has the flexibility to be used as a prototyping board (with headers) by hobbyists, or it can be soldered into a bigger circuit (without headers) for production.

The Photon is also Arduino-compatible, like its predecessor.

Figure 2: Particle Photon

The technical details of the Photon are as follows:

The Photon has additional capabilities such as a wake-up pin for waking up from low power modes. The Photon is optimized to use less power, and this is made possible by the new Wi-Fi module it uses—Broadcom's BCM43362, which it incorporates. This new Wi-Fi chip powers other popular IoT products such as Nest Protect, LIFX, and others, as it provides the most stable solution. The Photon is available for $19 USD, and can be purchased from Particle's online store at https://store.particle.io.

The Electron is a cousin of the Photon with minor differences. It has a GSM module instead of a Wi-Fi module. The Electron can be used for creating cellular-connected electronics projects and products. It ships with a SIM card, and is optimized for low-bandwidth messages. The SIM card offers affordable data plans for over 100 countries worldwide through carriers such as Telefonica, AT&T, T-Mobile, O2, Movistar, Vivo, Telenor, Rogers, and many more. You can find the list of countries where the Electron's GSM connectivity is available at https://www.particle.io/cellular.

Figure 3: Particle Electron

The technical details of the Electron are as follows:

The Electron is available both in 2G and 3G variants. The Electron 2G is available for US $39, while the Electron the 3G variant is available for US $59. The Electron SIM card is available without any contracts, and the basic data charges are $2.99 per month for 1 MB and an additional $0.99 for each additional megabyte of data transferred.

This section provides a tabular comparison between Spark Core, Particle Photon, and Particle Electron. This table can help in an easy reference of technical specifications, and can also help decide the best board to use for a given project.