Particle.io has some relatively inexpensive and lightweight IoT boards that connect via WiFi (Photon) or Cellular Networks (Electron). They are focused on providing a fully functioning cloud based IDE for development and production devices. Programming is accomplished via Wiring, the same framework as Arduino. Since the framework is open source down to the bare metal, you can also use C/C++ or ARM assembly.

For my first project with the Photon, I created a wireless temperature monitor that displays in a Google Sheet. I used a TMP36 Sensor and imported the results utilizing Script Editor and this Import JSON Script. The JSON output from the Photon looks like this (“deviceID” intentionally obscured):

{
 "cmd": “VarReturn”,
 "name": “analogvalue”,
 "result": 964,
 "coreInfo": {
   "last_app": “”,
   "last_heard": “2016-05-22T22:00:00.209Z”,
   "connected": true,
   "last_handshake_at": “2016-05-22T21:20:20.002Z”,
   "deviceID": “UNIQUE_ID”,
   "product_id": 6
 }
}

In the last post I tested the IR receiver; next step verify the IR LEDs emit light. If you are lucky enough to have a remote in the database maintained @ lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/, you may not even need to record. None of these worked for my remotes, so I created custom config files for each remote. However, these are great for testing functionality. I found it easier to connect to the Raspberry Pi via FTP with FileZilla to move config files around than via SSH with PuTTy. This did require adjusting permissions using chmod on /etc/lirc/lircd.conf via SSH, to allow the Write operation.

• Back up the original /etc/lirc/lircd.conf and then replace it with a working config from the LIRC Database.
• Restart LIRC to pick up these changes:

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc stop
sudo /etc/init.d/lirc start