Post Overview

  • IoT with Particle: publishing events

    In the two previous posts, we discussed setup and talked about triggering actions and reading sensor data. Particle also allows you to publish events. You can subscribe to these events or pass them to other systems such as Azure IoT Hub. Let’s build on the previous example with the LED and the photoresistor. When we… Read more

  • IoT with Particle: Functions and Variables using the Build IDE

    In yesterday’s post, I talked a bit about the setup process and initial configuration of a Particle Photon. To start quickly, we used the Tinker firmware and the Particle iOS app to light up a LED using digitalWrite to light it up with full brightness (full 3.3V) but also with analogWrite to vary the brightness… Read more

  • IoT with Particle: a smooth experience

    At ThingTank, the IoT brand of Xylos, we make our own IoT hardware which can be quite complex if you need to connect multiple sensors efficiently, or even multiple MCUs where each MCU has its own set of sensors. Most people that want to start with IoT (typically at home or for a small company… Read more

  • Have some fun with Slash Webtasks and Slack

    At ThingTank we really love a tool like Slack because of its simplicity and extensibility. Like so many, we use it to get notifications from all sorts of systems. A lot of websites and tools integrate with Slack such as Azure Logic Apps or CI systems like Shippable. Those types of integrations are very easy… Read more

  • IoT Hub Scaling

    When you work with Azure IoT Hub, it is not always easy to tell what will happen when you reach the limits of IoT Hub and what to do when you reach those limits. As a reminder, recall that the scale of IoT Hub is defined by its tier and the number of units in… Read more

  • Adding natural language to your Bot

    In the last post, Bots in an IoT context, I created a very simple bot to request the air quality in a room. To change the room, you had to type change room and then type the room name when requested. It would be much nicer to be able to give commands like change room… Read more