Particle Offline Utility is a tool created by Nathan Robinson to facilitate local Particle development on macOS and Linux Distributions. It installs all the necessary tools for offline Particle development and provides a more streamlined interface for creating Particle firmware.
Particle Offline Utility is written as po-util, and the Particle Offline Utility command is po.
po-util makes it easy for developers to download the Particle Toolchain and install the required dependencies to quickly begin creating projects using the Particle Platform.
po-util features a responsive experience, giving developers the tools they
need for seamless local development, providing understandable commands for
simplifying complex tasks like properly compiling and flashing firmware.
Install
The quickest and easiest way to install po-util on Linux or macOS is to run the following:
$ bash <(curl -sL get.po-util.com)You will be asked to answer several prompts during the installation.
Key Features
Library Manager
The library manager makes it easy to use Particle libraries when developing
with po-util locally by using git to download Particle libraries hosted on
GitHub and save them to a ~/.po-util/lib directory so that they make be linked
inside of projects later. Read more about the Library Manager here.
Full dependency setup
po-util installs all of the dependencies required for local Particle
Development, including the ARM toolchain, dfu-util,
nodejs, particle-cli and the Particle firmware.
Local compilation and support for flashing over USB or OTA
Building firmware locally for Electrons, Photons and P1s, and automatically flashing over USB using dfu-util or Over The Air using particle-cli. Sequentially flashing multiple devices at once over the air is also supported.
Shortcuts for Building in Atom
po-util supports shortcuts for Atom, the popular open-
source IDE by GitHub. The shourcuts provide quick access to commonly used
commands for po, including: building firmware, flashing firmware over
USB, and flashing firmware Over The Air. Read more about the shortcuts
here.
Project Structure
The directory structure of a full po-util project is arranged like so:
firmware/
├ main.cpp
└ lib1/
├ lib1.cpp
├ lib1.h
└ ...
bin/
├ firmware.bin
└ ...
ci/
devices.txt
libs.txt
.atom-build.yml
.travis.yml
.gitignore
.git/
README.md
- All user code is kept inside of
firmware/. - The compiled binary will be named
firmware.bin, and it will be inbin/. - You can keep track of which devices are in a project and list which ones to be flashed Over The Air in
devices.txt. - Libraries are kept track of in
libs.txt. - Atom shortcuts are configured in
.atom-build.yml. - Every
po-utilproject is initialized as a repository with scripts inci/to use Travis CI for testing.
Project setup
When using po, your code is arranged into projects with the structure
described above. This not only lets you easily work on many projects on one
computer, but it provides a standardized way of building locally.
Creating a project with po is simple when you use po init to initialize a project by creating the necessary files. Below is an example:
$ po DEVICE_TYPE init someProject
You can set DEVICE_TYPE to either photon, P1, electron, core, pi, or duo. This is
necessary for generating the Atom shortcuts file appropriately.
More Information
Here is some more information about using po.
Writing Firmware
po compiles any .cpp and .h files found in the firmware/
directory, but not .ino files, so #include "Particle.h" must be present
in your main.cpp file. This is done for you when you run the po init
command to create a project directory.
Building Firmware
To compile firmware, simply run po DEVICE_TYPE build, substituting DEVICE_TYPE for
photon, P1, or electron. To compile and flash firmware to your device
using dfu-util, simply run po DEVICE_TYPE flash. To clean the project, run po DEVICE_TYPE clean.
DFU Commands
To upload precompiled code over USB, run po DEVICE_TYPE dfu. To put your device
into dfu mode, run po dfu-open. To get your device out of dfu mode, run po dfu-close.
Over The Air (OTA) Uploading
To upload precompiled code over the air using particle-cli, run po DEVICE_TYPE ota DEVICE_NAME, where DEVICE_NAME is the name of your device in the Particle
cloud. You must be logged into particle-cli to use this feature. You can log
into particle-cli with particle cloud login.
You can also flash code to multiple devices at once by passing the -m or
--multi argument to ota. This would look like po DEVICE_TYPE ota -m. This
relies on a file called devices.txt that you must create in your po
project directory.
Testimonials
"I think you identified a common pain point for a lot of users, and the automated installation of the Particle toolchain is a problem that we've been focused on a lot recently ... you should already feel proud of yourself because you have made a meaningful contribution to the community. We are all very thankful for it - our community regularly impresses us, and you are certainly not an exception."
"I found that po-util works wonders by condensing the many disparate steps required to automate command-line interactions with Particle products into simple, clear commands. No need to futz with the weird serial stuff on Linux, and nicely full featured. So much better than pressing the buttons, even if you aren’t automating anything else. Highly recommend!"
"It has been nearly flawless and a HUGE productivity booster... I cannot believe your steps worked installing so many utils and dependencies perfectly... The Particle world owes you a big debt. If there were Emmy awards for Particle contribs, you would get one."
"Nice! This is great stuff. Definitely helpful for the local dev / offline use case. Thanks for sharing."
"Thanks a lot for this amazing tool. I finally managed to get everything as I wanted: to be able to work off-line."
"Po-util is a very handy script - thanks for sharing."
"I can't heart this enough!"
