When cost or power put constraints on your hardware design budget, working with microcontrollers can be a relevant option. With a special transceiver chip for Internet access, boards such as the Particle Photon can, for example, act as sensor nodes in a room. Of interest to the book, much of the Particle toolchain is developed in JavaScript. This sets the background for this chapter.
The Particle (formerly Spark.io) family of boards talks to networks with different chips. The Photon board uses a WiFi chip from Broadcom (BCM43362) that handles the WiFi RF and protocol layer. Besides boards with WiFi, there are Particle boards that support 3G cellular networks.
The Particle Photon
From the perspective of the physical layer, an embedded device can either support Internet access on the same chip (as the Tessel 2 shows) or with specialized chips that handle the Internet connection.
In this chapter, let’s look at a strategy to add building blocks for WiFi with an external chip such as the Particle Photon. The Particle Photon has a small form factor and low power consumption. But as with much of engineering, there are tradeoffs in selecting the “best” approach. From a JavaScript viewpoint, the Particle Photon is interesting because of its Node.js-based toolchain to develop applications with a Photon. The Particle Photon is shown in Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1. ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
