A collection of programming snippets, tips, and tricks for developing with Particle IoT devices
A collection of programming snippets, tips, and tricks for developing with Particle IoT devices.
The Particle ecosystem of devices along with their Particle Cloud platform make it simple for hobbyists and product developers to create connected projects. Their product line currently includes:
Wifi: Core, Photon, Argon
Cellular: (2G/3G/LTE): Electron, Boron
Mesh: (based on IEEE 802.15.4-2006): Xenon, Argon, Boron
Bluetooth: RedBear Duo, RedBear Nano, Xenon, Argon, Boron
The RedBear product line is still available for sale, but it is unclear whether Particle will continue to develop or support them.
Particle Mesh devices are capable of supporting Bluetooth 5, but the software APIs are still under development as of January 2019.
Particle provides many excellent tools for developing software for their devices, including a browser-based Web IDE, Particle Workbench (an IDE built on Microsoft Visual Studio Code), and Particle CLI (a command-line experience).
Particle Workbench allows you to build and flash firmware locally, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and Particle CLI is an excellent tool for building firmware or managing your Particle devices.
You can choose to install and use Particle’s Device OS toolchain directly if you wish by setting up the environment manually, or by using a third-party utility like po-util.
Particle has a detailed documentation of the firmware libraries, tutorials, and sample code, which covers most anything you need to know, and the community forums are a great resource when you have questions. If you have a question about how to hook up some odd sensor, or how to use a certain code library, send data to a third-party service, or just about anything really, you’ll often find the answer in the forums.
In fact, the forums are chock-full of great information, tips, little-known facts, pointers to other tools, etc. So full, that it can be overwhelming. Sometimes when you have a problem, you aren’t even sure what to search for. And sometimes, you don’t even know that a feature exists, because you’ve just never run across it before.
This Cookbook is an attempt to address this problem by collecting and (hopefully) organizing some of these hidden gems so that you don’t have to waste time searching through the forums, trying to filter out tons of unanswered questions, or long threads that touch on a topic, then spin off in another direction, or trying to piece together bits of the technically excellent firmware documentation into a code example that works for your particular, unusual use-case.
Particle Technical Documentation Writer @rickkas7 has several good tutorials and example code in his Github: https://github.com/rickkas7
If you have suggestions, additions, corrections, complaints, or whatever, please feel free to let me know. Pull Requests welcome. For now, I’m just making this a collection of Markdown files, but I’m open to suggestions for other organizational schemes.