Hey guys, John from John's DIY Playground. Today I want review for you the internet of
things board called the Photon, made by Particle. They're at http://particle.io/ they make this
board which is wifi-based you can flash it over the air and send and receive data from
it very easily on the web. They also make an Electron device they call
it, it's a 3G cellular version of this which is really, really interesting. Check out my video on my channel for that
review if you're interested in that product. Today I'm going to unbox this Photon and show
you what you get inside, and how to get your first program up and running. So let's have a look. It's a very small device as you can see compared
to this quarter. It's got analog and digital outputs just like
an Arduino would. It comes with this nice sticker. It tells you go to their website http://particle.io/start
to get started which we'll show in a minute. And then the device itself I ordered with
headers which means it comes pre-soldered with the pins on it so it's easy to breadboard. On the bottom it's very plain, which is fine. On top you've got a couple of buttons, you've
got a built-in chip antenna, and then you've got this uFl connector. That's if you wanted to use an external antenna,
but I find that just using the wifi network with the chip antenna has no signal problems
whatsoever. Let's take a look what we need to do next
on the web. Alright guys so get started I've followed
the instruction on the box that said http://particle.io/start pulls up this page here. You've got the Core which is like maybe a
2-year old device. The Photon what we're talking about today
is really like Core 2.0 in my opinion. And then there's the Electron which really
just came out here in February 2016. So we're going to setup a Photon and so I'll
click on that. And it's giving us an introduction and a guide. It's best to set this up by using the online
instructions so I'll click on this "Setup my Photon". And it's going to say to power on the device
which we'll do here in a moment. But very straightforward instructions. The other thing to remember is you want to
connect at first with your wifi in your house. And the way to do that is you use your smartphone. In order to do that, you can go on Android
or iPhone and visit the store, find the Particle, just search "Particle Photon" and you'll find
it. I've of course already downloaded this for
my iPhone. There's the particle app called Tinker. But you can see here it's going to show some
of my devices. I've got an Electron as you can see I've got
a couple of other devices. I'm going to setup a 4th device here for you
today and show you how that works. A 3rd Photon of mine. So let me power up and we'll get started with
the next steps. So I got my Photon attached to a breadboard
here. I'm just going to plug it in for the first
time. The problem with it is it's not going to be
able to see my network yet. So that's why I logged in on that Particle
phone app and created a user account. I'm using my existing one of course in this
case. This flashing blue is normal for first time
on. So what you do is when you show the screen
that I just showed a moment ago on your phone, you hit the plus icon down at the lower right
part of your phone and then you click on "setup a Photon". Hit the plus button. It says "Click ready" when you're ready for
it. Choose your Photon, it should show up in the
list on the screen. And of course this thing is just flashing
away here as you can see. It's trying to connect to the Photon and the
phone. I'm using a different phone right now, but
it's trying to connect to it. And now it says "please select your wifi network"
so I'm going to select my home network. And then it asks for the password, I'm not
going to show that of course but I'm typing that in right now. And then I say connect. It's saying "connecting your Photon to your
network, it can take about a minute". But you can see it's already reacting. The light is changing here how it's flashing. And now that it's breathing cyan like that,
I know that its actually talking to the internet. It's on the cloud. So what might happen next is if it needs any
kind of firmware updates it would start flashing again like a deep magenta color. So what I'm going to do now is just let this
thing go for a few minutes and then we'll come back and we'll talk about writing our
first program. Now that my Photon is connected to the cloud
and has talked to basically the Particle.io website, I can see it now in the list of my
devices, and it's got the "hoiser_crazy", it always comes up with this random name. But you can edit it and just change it. Go ahead and click there and change it to
whatever the heck you want. In my case I'm going to name it tabasco4. Why not? So now it's got a new name. And let's move onto the next step. Before I get into showing you the software
that will we're going to use for this demonstration, I wanted to point out how I hooked up my Photon
to this breadboard. So first we have onboard this digital D7 LED. We're going to make that flash on and off
once per second. Second thing we're going to do is I have this
photoresistor, it's hooked up to the A0 pin and the A5. Then I also have a 1K ohm resistor hooked
up to the ground, also hooked to analog 5. And then on the other side the third thing
we're going to control is this LED from the web. I have that plugged into D0 and then it runs
from the other pin back over to ground through this 220 ohm resistor. And that's how you setup your breadboard for
this demonstration. Alright because we're going to control and
LED over the web, we're going to have to actually write 2 pieces of code. I'll go over the easier of the two pieces
right here. This is the HTML file. And you can find this on my GitHub site that
I'll put in the description below. But your file will need to be modified in
such a way it works with your Photon. There's only 2 areas to change. The first is on this line #14 where it says
Your Device ID goes Here. You need to find out what your device ID is
on your Photon. And so in order to do that what you do is
you come over to the Particle build site and you would click on your Devices. And then you would choose your device and
when you click on this right arrow it'll open up and show you your device ID. So that's as easy as that for that section. Now the other part you need that's critical
is you need to keep the LED part of this line and the question mark and then delete this
access token. Well, I'm sorry, you leave the access token
equals and you put this part where Your Access Token goes here. That section is also found on the Particle
web site. And to find that, what you do is again go
to the build section and you would click on the settings gear. And that will open and show you what your
access token is. Both of those pieces are critical in order
for this web functionality to work. Now this is the second of the two pieces of
code that we need. This is in the Particle build website where
I place this. And you'll find a copy of this also on my
GitHub website which you'll see in the links below this video. But I did comment it quite a bit so hopefully
it's easy enough for everyone to follow. I won't get into too much detail here about
the code but basically again our three objectives. It's going to flash the onboard LED at pin
D7, we're going to read the sensor light levels and report that to the Particle web site,
I'll show you how we can see what those reports are in real time. And then finally we're going to control that
LED over the web as we described earlier with that HMTL file. Each Particle code is similar to Arduino where
you declare your different integers and variables up in the front, in the beginning. Then it runs through this setup routine which
is just a 1-time through when its on power up it initializes and does all these different
things here. We actually describe a function called "LEDtoggle"
that's going to be at the end of this code you'll see. Then there's the main loop section. It's not that big, it actually only goes to
here. But we're cycling through the code very quickly
and what we're doing is we're checking the system time on the Photon using the command
called millis. And then comparing that to let's say the last
time the Photon blinked the LED or reported to the Particle web site. So that's how we do this. We don't sit and do delays, we're actually
using millis and setting timers. Now as far as the light level, we're going
to report that in two different way. First, we're going to report and categorize
it and say if it's dark, medium, or is it bright. We can send those different strings up to
the Particle web site and we'll show that. And then finally we're actually going to show
the light level as a value. It can be a value of 0 through 4095. However in the case of the photoresistor I'm
using I'm getting readings anywhere from 200 to about 1100. So we're going to setup our if then statements
based on those ranges. And then finally at the end of the loop there's
a separate function again called LED toggle. And that's how we're going to control that
external LED over the web. It's looking for a command to run this function
and it either turns the LED on or off. OK so no we're ready to finally demonstrate
how this all works. So what I'm going to do first here is I'm
going to plug in my Photon. And you can hear my computer acknowledging
that its connected via USB in this case. The next thing you want to do is you come
over before your flash anything and you want to choose which device is the device you are
going to actually flash to. So again click on devices section here and
wherever this star is, is the item that's going to be flashed. So we want to flash to tabasco4 which is our
new Photon. So now that I have the star there we can go
ahead and do the actual flashing. Now to do that, you just click on this little
lightning bolt, and you'll see the status down here tells us it's going to be flashing
magenta, which it is. And that's it. It's already over the air sent that code to
my Photon. I'll show you how the onboard LED is flashing
on the web part of the code but let's show the dashboard first. Since we're hooked up the Particle dashboard
can be found at dashboard.particle.io. And this shows a user log of what's happening
with your device online. So you can actually see these references to
tabasco4 and it's sending the sensor value last reported was 857 and then the category
as I mention in my code is we're going with low, medium, or high. And it's reporting this value every so often
according to the delay value that I set in the code. If I cover the sensor with my finger like
I am now you can see its says dark. And the value drops significantly. We're down to 258. Conversely if I try to get it into kind of
a brighter area and wait for it to report you can see 1352 and it's reporting bright. Alright guys so here we have the Photon itself
up and running. You've got it breathing cyan which is the
normal status when its hooked up to the cloud. D7 is flashing on and off at a rate of once
every second like we talked. Our light sensor is functioning and reporting
the light levels to the web, and then we have this external LED which we're about to control. I've pulled up my web site, web page that
we showed earlier. The HTML. Cilcked on the "turn LED on" and then I click
the "Do it" button. I'll do that right now. And there you can see it reacted almost instantaneously. So if I hit back on my browser, and I click
"turn the LED off", then click Do It, and there you have it. It's reacting very, very quickly. And that's it, that's how the demonstration
works. Hope you enjoyed it, hope you learned something. If you did, please click on "Like" and also
subscribe to my channel so you'll be informed when new videos come out. This is John from John's DIY Playground, and
have a great day.
