The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the everyday physical objects that surround us into an ecosystem of information that will enrich our lives. Many industry experts and excited consumers have pegged The Internet of Things (IoT) as the next Industrial Revolution or the Next Internet.The IoT is much more than the result of seemingly fragmented and complex technologies smashed together. IoT is beginning to grow significantly, as consumers, businesses, and governments recognize the benefit of connecting inert devices to the internet.

Millions to Billions of devices to be connected:

By 2020 there will be more than 34 Billion connected to the internet, driven by rapid development in digitization and networking and growing efforts to bring as much as electronic devices under the digital fold. Internet of Things is expected to be the largest market in the world with an estimation that it will be more than the double the size of tablet, smartphone, PC and the wearable market by 2019. Sensors playing a vital role in wireless connectivity, turning billions of objects in data-generating “things”, like position, temperature, light, etc. and at times interact with the environment will be a key factor to increase the devices connected to the internet.

Consumers and Businesses:

The IoT is going to help consumers achieve their goals by improving their decision-making capacity through augmented intelligence provided by IoT. As IoT is now viewed as a new revenue stream, from 2016 and beyond it will be a main stream path for generating higher revenue because of data monetization, low power devices and platform as a service. The Internet of Business Things is will help companies by achieving process optimization and efficiencies by collecting and reporting data collected by the business environment.

Factors accelerating Adoption:

Evolving regulatory landscape – Regulatory factor will be a huge driving factor behind the IoT adoption. The requirement in sectors where the product can multiply up to 10 times that is from manufactures to consumers will lead to deployment of millions of sensors to track machines and other assets. IoT will enhance the performance of small/medium/large enterprises by quickly providing critical information to the customers and chain partners. As more and more things are ranging from remotely programmable home appliances, fitness devices to aircraft jet engines the IT sector is going to be mostly dominated by the IoT projects.

Increasing Consumer Expectation – As consumers have now started to appreciate their smartphone, they are well known with the fact that smartphones can do a lot more. Since consumers want to be connected they also want what and how things are connected to them are things that matter them the most.

Easing innovation for enterprises – IoT provides a single platform for development tools, building and managing applications, secure network connectivity. The availability of such a mature platform eases the development process and helps enterprise users to focus on creation of new product and service category for better future experience for citizens, consumers businesses.

Before you begin.

Read about the particle and how to dump code into the device here https://docs.particle.io/guide/getting-started/intro/photon/

Particle function 

These are a simple cloud functions which control the device based on the instructions written.

Write the particle functions using Spark.function('function_name', callback)

Below is a sample 'lights' function. This will on/off the default LED on particle based on the commands given by particle API over the internet.

// ----------------------------------- // Controlling LEDs over the Internet // ----------------------------------- // First, let's create our "shorthand" for the pins // Same as in the Blink an LED example: // led1 is D0, led2 is D7 int led1 = D0; int led2 = D7; // Last time, we only needed to declare pins in the setup function. // This time, we are also going to register our Spark function void setup() {   // Here's the pin configuration, same as last time   pinMode(led1, OUTPUT);   pinMode(led2, OUTPUT);   // We are also going to declare a Spark.function so that we can turn the LED on and off from the cloud.   Spark.function("lights",ledToggle);   // This is saying that when we ask the cloud for the function "led", it will employ the function ledToggle() from this app.   // For good measure, let's also make sure both LEDs are off when we start:   digitalWrite(led1, LOW);   digitalWrite(led2, LOW); } // Last time, we wanted to continously blink the LED on and off // Since we're waiting for input through the cloud this time, // we don't actually need to put anything in the loop void loop() {   // Nothing to do here } // We're going to have a super cool function now that gets called when a matching API request is sent // This is the ledToggle function we registered to the "led" Spark.function earlier. int ledToggle(String command) {    /* Spark.functions always take a string as an argument and return an integer.    Since we can pass a string, it means that we can give the program commands on how the function should be used.    In this case, telling the function "on" will turn the LED on and telling it "off" will turn the LED off.    Then, the function returns a value to us to let us know what happened.    In this case, it will return 1 for the LEDs turning on, 0 for the LEDs turning off,    and -1 if we received a totally bogus command that didn't do anything to the LEDs.    */    if (command=="on") {        digitalWrite(led1,HIGH);        digitalWrite(led2,HIGH);        return 'light-on';    }    else if (command=="off") {        digitalWrite(led1,LOW);        digitalWrite(led2,LOW);        return 0;    }    else {        return -1;    } }

** Code is taken from Particle cloud IDE examples.

Details of your particle device? 🔌

Do curl -X GET https://api.particle.io/v1/devices/xxxxxDEVICE-IDxxxxxxxxxx?access_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxa642c8c9bd7cec32dbexxx

This will also give the list of all the functions which are loaded onto your particle.

Run the above function with an argument (on/off)?

To ON the LED do, 🌕 curl -X POST https://api.particle.io/v1/devices/xxxxxDEVICE-IDxxxxxxxxxx/function_name -d "value=on" -d access_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxa642c8c9bd7cec32dbexxx

To OFF the LED do, 🌚 curl -X POST https://api.particle.io/v1/devices/xxxxxDEVICE-IDxxxxxxxxxx/function_name -d "value=off" -d access_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxa642c8c9bd7cec32dbexxx