Sensing

Here you'll find basic ‘blackboxed’ electronic+coding recipes that mostly build off from the ‘Ground Zero’ templates. You can use these to build and set up your sensing kits..

Some of these recipes also incorporate connectivity to the Blynk app, so be sure you read up on the Blynk documentation to get a better idea on how to use Blynk in your experiments.

If you need help with basic uploading and managing of your Photon, always refer to the official Particle Documentation. The sample code snippets are published here as handy starting points for coding and are meant to help develop your understanding of working with electronics and microcontrollers.

These sensing recipes are not necessarily designed solely for it's intended purpose – experiment with them and see what other types of data you can gather!

Finally, you might also come across some incompatibilities – the nature of multiple fast-changing development environments means code libraries might get updated and break older code, so use these as a general rule of thumb.

Please note that we will NOT be working with mains voltages, or anything higher than 12VDC. As always, with all things electronic, practice common-sense safety, check with us if you have queries, and always have a teammate ready to kill the power should anything go wrong.

Environmental

Temperature/Humidity: SHT31-D
Soil moisture: Capacitive moisture sensor
Steam/rain: Steam sensor
Windspeed: Hot wire sensor

Optical

Ambient/incident light levels (simple): TEMT6000
Ambient/incident light colour (advanced): TCS34725
Near-field/reflected colour (advanced): TCS34725

Aural

Near/mid-field sounds: Freetronics microphone sensor

Kinetic / Haptic

Knock/Vibration: Piezo
Touch/Capacitance: MPR121 capacitance sensor
Near/Mid-field Distance: VL53L0X
Movement: Passive Infrared (PIR)
Movement/Acceleration: MMA8451
DIY momentary presence/actuation DIY