Unboxing Hardware: Photon Particle Wifi — the Martin files

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Here’s another edition of Martin Castro live tweeting hardware and me collecting it all into a single digestible blog post. The rest of this post is direct from Martin’s finger tips here. Enjoy!

Let’s check out this beginner / intermediate microcontroller kit! I am working on a TOP SECRET project with @joelatwar and @CodeSpent and I thought I’d take a couple minutes to talk about this lil’ IoT device and unbox it. Let’sa go.

Here’s the kit on Amazon. It’s Particle’s Maker Kit that comes with all kinds of goodies. I’ll go through them 1-by-1 so you can see what it comes with and decide if it’s something you want. (amzn.to/2YTjrgJ) Here’s the actual Photon. It comes in a static-free baggy and already attached to a breadboard. Usually Arduinos / Raspberry Pis come loose and you have to buy and attach it to a breadboard yourself.

A whole grip of cables, dog. These are pretty beautiful when they’re all attached like this, it’s going to be painful to tear them apart to actually use them. Male->Male Jumpers tied up with a twist-tie, and a strip of Male->Female Jumpers

A buncha little resistors, a couple photoresistors, some ceramic capacitors, and electrolytic capacitors. I’m gonna be real. I have no idea what an electrolytic capacitor does. I just plug them in when The Googles tells me to #realtalk

Here’s the LEDs. A bunch of solid-color LEDs, one RGB LED (might use this for status lights e.g. on the front of a computer/server), and apparently one of these is an Infrared LED. Is that like the ones on your TV remote? I can’t wait to try that sucker out.

Lookit the wee little servo! A servo is a motor, folks. You can send signals to this thing to make it turn a little arm a predetermined-amount of rotations. We’ll do something with this too.

Ok, I have no idea what this is. It’s big and it has some electrolytic capacitors and resistors on the back, as well as a little processor. The bag contains a piezo buzzer, some buttons, and a little vibrating motor. So you can make all kinds of sensors and haptic feedback stuff.

A temperature sensor that plugs right into the breadboard. You could use this, e.g., to test the temperature outside your house and automatically turn on your sprinkler system when it gets hot out. Protect those petunias.

Another thing I don’t know about. What do. Can’t wait to do some googling and figure this out.

This is either a sous vide like the ones @ken_wheeler uses to make mediocre steaks or a curling iron for a Barbie doll. I don’t know dude.

Prototype board (no soldering!) and USB power.

Battery pack. You can go fully mobile with these bad boys. My Particle is only Wifi, but they make ones that have LTE. It would be cool to make a GPS “message in a bottle” and throw it into the ocean, and track its movements with the Gulf Stream or something.

Here’s the whole dang kit! You can buy them on Amazon Prime with 2 day shipping here:

This is an affiliate link, so If you buy it from this link I get a very small percentage of the sales price. So do it. I need beer money. (amzn.to/2YTjrgJ)

A note from the editor: For additional reading on capacitors check out this page.