Move over Arduino Uno, Particle Photon is here!

I recently found myself wanting to create something to measure the temperature, humidity and light levels around a rather needy orchid I was growing to help me not kill it so quickly. This immediately made me think of my arduino uno. However it requires a separate shield to use wifi and is pretty large for what I wanted to do so I looked for alternatives. It was then I found the Particle photon.

This tiny component is usb powered, has an onboard wifi chip and a really cool ecosystem of software to help you interact with it (cloud IDE, mobile app, cloud storage etc.).

Any look how tiny!

Here is a guide on how to initialise your photon, connect it to your wifi network and make an LED flash using the mobile phone app.

First plug a powered USB cable into the power socket of the photon. Then open the particle app on your phone.

    

You won't have any devices listed yet so press the '+' to start setting up the photon. It may take a while for your device to appear in the list. Your board should be flashing blue to indicate it is in setup mode. If it is not then hold the 'setup' button for 3 seconds which should switch it to setup mode.

Once your photon has been discovered it will pop up in the list with a random name.

  

Click the photon and follow the wizard to connect it to your wifi network of choice. If all goes well you will end on the the setup complete screen.

Your photon will now be listed under your devices. If you click on the menu icon you can rename it to something more sensible. The first time you pair your photon with your account it may take a while for the status of your device to change to 'online' with a green circle. When I did mine the LED on the photon was flashing and changing colours for a few minutes before it settled down on a solid cyan light indicating it was finished initialising. I assume it was downloading updates. Any subsequent time you open the app (assuming your photon is powered and connected to the wifi) the status should appear as online almost immediately.

You can now enter 'Tinker' mode on the app where you are presented with the pin layout below. You can click on the pins to set a hi/low value to the output.  There is an LED on the board attached to pin D7, so set D7 to hi and you should see the LED light up on your board. Pretty cool!