The Photon is a $19 tiny Wi-Fi development kit for creating connected projects and products for the Internet of Things. It's easy to use, it's powerful, and it's connected to the cloud.
The tools that make up the Photon's ecosystem (and come along with the board) are designed to let you build and create whether you're an embedded engineer, web developer, Arduino enthusiast or IoT entrepreneur. You'll be able to write your firmware in our web or local IDE, deploy it over the air, and build your web and mobile apps with ParticleJS and our Mobile SDK.
The board itself uses a Broadcom wi-fi chip (one that can be found in Nest Protect, LIFX, and Amazon Dash) alongside a powerful STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller. It's like the Spark Core, but better.
Note: Does not ship with
breadboard or USB cable.
Particle Photon Projects:
Particle Photon Project 1: IOT Plant Moisture Notifier
Get a text or call if your plant is getting too dry, along with a nice LCD display giving information regarding your plant's health.
Particle Photon Project 2: E-Paper Weather Display With Photon and IFTTT
If you have an E-Reader such as a Barnes & Noble NOOK or an Amazon Kindle then you're already familiar with e-paper. The e-paper display on your e-reader is what allows you to read it in direct sunlight without any glare. However, you also know that the e-paper screen takes a really long time to update. This means that you can't use it for gaming, but it's perfect for providing you with timely weather information wherever you need it! This super-simple project creates just that with minimal assembly and coding time. Let's dive in!
Hardware Components:
Particle Photon Project 3: Annoying Soil Moisture Sensor with Photon and IFTTT Project
Never forget to water your plants again with this super annoying project. It combines visual, auditory, and textual cues that will prevent you from doing anything else until you provide your plant with much-needed hydration. A piezo buzzer constantly blares a shrill note, while a super-bright LED annoys your peripheral vision. In addition, this project will send constant texts to your phone reminding you that your plant needs to be watered. Sounds like fun, right?
Hardware Components:
Particle Photon Project 4: Death Star word clock
Fast forward to Maker Faire 2015, where I had the pleasure of meeting the Particle team and several of the Elites, I noticed one of the latter was building a word clock as well. That's what gave me the final motivation to build one myself. Luckily I saw him struggling with soldering well over a 100 Neopixels for over a day, and I decided mine would have to be simpler. One of the other Elites had made an interesting project with an RGB matrix, which sparked the idea that those two might make a great combo.
Hardware components:
More Photon projects are available
here.|Features|
- Particle Photon Wi-Fi module
- Broadcom BCM43362 Wi-Fi chip
- 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
- STM32F205 120Mhz ARM Cortex M3
- 1MB flash, 128KB RAM
- On-board RGB status LED (ext. drive provided)
- 18 Mixed-signal GPIO and advanced peripherals
- Open source design
- Real-time operating system (FreeRTOS)
- Soft AP setup
- FCC, CE and IC certified
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|Projects|Project 1.
IOT Plant Moisture NotifierGet a text or call if your plant is getting too dry, along with a nice LCD display giving information regarding your plant's health.
Hardware Components:
Particle Photon
Soil Moisture Sensor For Arduino
I2C 16x2 Arduino LCD Display Module
RGB Diffused Common Cathode
Micro USB Connector
Uxcell Perf Board 4x6cm