I've been playing around with the Spark Core (a microcontroller with built-in wi-fi) for a couple of days now and have made very slow progress.
Before I start, I want to say how cool I feel to be playing with this device to begin with. It was given to me by one of our StartupBus sponsors - Particle - in a Spark Core pack. Being fairly new with programming microcontrollers, however, I had some issues setting it up that I did find to be quite common on the interwebs.
First off, the Spark Core is supposed to be Arduino-compatible. By that they mean that if you can program an Arduino (which I can and love to do), you should be able to program the Spark.
On the package the Spark Core came in it tells me to visit www.spark.io/start to get started. This site took me through a series of instructions to set up the device that deceivingly seemed simple. One of the first instructions told me how to connect the device to a local wi-fi through an app that I could download on my phone. This didn't work for me after several attempts, and its only recommendation for this error was to try again. I researched for a little while until finding a way to connect the Spark through my computer's command line. This didn't work at first when I let the system try to find Catalyze's wi-fi on its own, but eventually I got it to work by manually typing in the SSID and password. Phew.
So now my Spark was wi-fi connected -- hurray! Now time to program it. There are three separate approaches to controlling the Spark - through the app (which now worked after the manual wi-fi connection), through a web IDE called Particle Build, and through the local IDE, Particle Dev. The app doesn't actually let you write a program to the Spark, but rather gives you some simple controls to set the pins HIGH and LOW. This is helpful for making sure your board works, but not for more complicated functions. Particle Build is a cool option for programming, however it is a little tricky when it comes to uploading your own libraries from GitHub. I used Particle Build only as far as playing around with its build-in sample code, although I'm sure I could have figured out the library problem if I really needed to. I uploaded the "Blink an LED" code to the Spark pretty easily, as well as the "Web-Connected LED" code, which worked through a simple HTML page and was pretty exciting.
To be continued tomorrow with Particle Dev...
Before I start, I want to say how cool I feel to be playing with this device to begin with. It was given to me by one of our StartupBus sponsors - Particle - in a Spark Core pack. Being fairly new with programming microcontrollers, however, I had some issues setting it up that I did find to be quite common on the interwebs.
First off, the Spark Core is supposed to be Arduino-compatible. By that they mean that if you can program an Arduino (which I can and love to do), you should be able to program the Spark.
On the package the Spark Core came in it tells me to visit www.spark.io/start to get started. This site took me through a series of instructions to set up the device that deceivingly seemed simple. One of the first instructions told me how to connect the device to a local wi-fi through an app that I could download on my phone. This didn't work for me after several attempts, and its only recommendation for this error was to try again. I researched for a little while until finding a way to connect the Spark through my computer's command line. This didn't work at first when I let the system try to find Catalyze's wi-fi on its own, but eventually I got it to work by manually typing in the SSID and password. Phew.
So now my Spark was wi-fi connected -- hurray! Now time to program it. There are three separate approaches to controlling the Spark - through the app (which now worked after the manual wi-fi connection), through a web IDE called Particle Build, and through the local IDE, Particle Dev. The app doesn't actually let you write a program to the Spark, but rather gives you some simple controls to set the pins HIGH and LOW. This is helpful for making sure your board works, but not for more complicated functions. Particle Build is a cool option for programming, however it is a little tricky when it comes to uploading your own libraries from GitHub. I used Particle Build only as far as playing around with its build-in sample code, although I'm sure I could have figured out the library problem if I really needed to. I uploaded the "Blink an LED" code to the Spark pretty easily, as well as the "Web-Connected LED" code, which worked through a simple HTML page and was pretty exciting.
To be continued tomorrow with Particle Dev...