particle subscribe mine

Hello everyone!

I finally got a chance to play with my Photon from particle.io, and I had been using the dashboard to debug my events..

I have a snipit of code that uses the provided OneWire library to read the temp from all of the sensors attached to my photon, and one by one 'Publish' a key/value pair to the particle API.  I was using the OneWire address in hex as the key, and the temp in fahrenheit as the value.  This would allow me to later create a mapping of which sensor was located where, but didn't need to be hard-coded into the firmware of the device.

I learned about two things today, both from the particle cli tool: particle subscribe mine and particle serial monitor

particle serial monitor lets me read the Serial.print* statements from my photon if I have it plugged in with a usb cable.  I was previously opening up the editor to do this (while actually editing my code in the slick web IDE).

particle subscribe mine is a way to subscribe to all events produced by your devices on your account.  Since my events are dynamically named based on the OneWire address, I didn't have a direct name to subscribe to.  I'll have to create a service to read in the values from my sensors and log them for later processing.

Happy Hacking!

Particle.io Photon!

Hi everyone!

I finally got a chance to play with my Particle Photon.

Photon chipset (left), Photon dev board (center), Electron (right)

I've had some prior experience with microcontrollers - and I decided to give the photon a try.  It's a pretty neat platform.  It comes set up with an onboard firmware/OS that once set up, will connect out to Particle's servers, and be accessible though their API.  

Right out of the box, I hooked it up to power, downloaded the Particle app to my iPhone, and pointed my iPhone's wifi at the broadcast from the Photon.  I was able to use the app to configure the photon with my home Wifi settings.  

My Phone connected, and I selected pin D7 (the device has a built in LED on that pin).  I told the pin to behave as a digitalWrite, this would allow me to toggle it between LOW and HIGH.  When toggled low, the LED was off.  When toggled high, the LED was on.  Success!

I happened to have some buttons wired up to my small breadboard, and I wanted to verify the digitalRead action of another pin.  I hooked pin D0 up to my button (which was connected between GND and VDD with a pull-up resistor).  

The entire time, the D0 indicator on the app showed HIGH.  Unplugged, plugged in, plugged in with button pressed or depressed.  Is this not working?  I tried connecting directly from D0 to GND, and D0 to VDD.  Every time it reported HIGH.  

I tried my Analog pin 0 (A0) and set it to analogRead.  it reported 4095 (what I think is the equivalent to HIGH on the D0 pin).  Hooked it up to ground, and the value didn't change!

Eventually in my plugging and unplugging of things, I ended up tapping on the A0 button on the iphone app, and I saw it's value change.    I plugged D0 back into ground, and tapped D0 on the app, and it changed from HIGH to LOW.  Ah ha!  So it turns out that the app doesn't live update the values, you have to tap the button to see the update!  

So... TL:DR;  The iPhone Particle app doesn't live update, you have to tap on a pin set to digitalRead or analogRead to read the new value of the pin!

Now, time to start actually building something with it!