When working with IoT projects it is common to want them to have a small footprint and ideally be hidden somewhere out of sight.

This could be the case for a number of reasons. Maybe you want it to be partially inside a wall because it is controlling your lights, or behind a picture frame so that it turns a spotlight towards that picture when someone is looking at it.

Nevertheless, if you want to be able to control many devices around your house price will always end up being something to consider.

In the past we’ve shown you how to get started with the Arduino Yun and even taught a dog how to send selfies with it. But at around $60 a pop it becomes unfeasible to hide one Arduino behind each one of your electrical devices, especially if you don’t need a full Linux distro in them.

In this blog post I will show you how to get started with the Particle Photon – a $19 tiny Wi-Fi development kit for creating connected projects and products for the Internet of Things. By the end of this post you will have learned the following things:

What a Photon is, and what is the technology behind it.

How to connect the photon to your computer and get started with its cloud based IDE.

How to flash your first program into the Photon.

How to build a form to control your Photon via the internet.

Overview

The Photon is only 1.44 x 0.8 inch in size, which means it’s smaller than a matchstick while still boxed.

But let’s look at what it has to offer:

You can power the Photon directly via the on-board USB Micro B connector or directly through the VIN pin. It has 18 digital pins and 10 analog pins.

It also has a very handy built-in LED – the D7 LED which is next to the D7 pin. This LED will turn on when the D7 pin is set to HIGH, which is really helpful when you just want to check that your programs work without having to wire a lot of gear.

The SETUP button is on the left and the RESET button is on the right. You can use these buttons to help you set your device’s mode.

The RGB LED is in the center of your Photon, above the module. The colour of the RGB LED indicates which mode your Photon is currently in.

A more in depth look at the Photon’s pinout can be seen below.

Connecting your Photon

In order to connect your Photon, you need to first make sure you claim it as yours. You can have as many claimed devices as you want and because the Photon is a cloud device you can claim it via its mobile app or USB. We will be doing this via USB and I will make the assumption you’ve already followed the installation steps for Windows or OSX depending on your environment.

Connect the Photon to your computer and you should see the status LED blinking blue. If you plan on connecting anything to your Photon right now, I would suggest plugging it on a breadboard to make things easier.



If for some reason it doesn’t start blinking blue, hold down the SETUP button until it does.

On a new terminal screen type the following: