A. Meet Your IoT Kit

In this first tutorial, you'll become familiar with your team's IoT electronics kit.

Tutorial Goals

The goals of this first tutorial are to help you:

  • Understand the features of your Photon circuit board (pins, ports, buttons, LED lights)

  • Identify the other components in your Photon kit and their purposes (inputs, outputs, connectors, and cables)

  • Understand how to create electronic circuits by connecting components to the Photon circuit board (using power pins, I/O pins, jumper wires, and breadboard)

Photon Kit

This guidebook is tailored for an IoT electronics kit called the SparkFun Inventor's Kit for Photon, which will simply be referred to as the Photon kit.

SparkFun is a company that sells products to help people build and program electronics devices. Photon is a Wi-Fi enabled microcontroller (small computer) from a company called Particle that sells IoT hardware and services that help inventors and other companies create their own IoT products.

SparkFun created its own Photon kit by incorporating the Photon P1 microcontroller into an easy-to-use circuit board and packaged it with a set of inputs, outputs, wires, and other parts to help you start inventing your own IoT devices. It is also possible to purchase additional parts (sensors, motors, etc.) that can be used with this Photon kit.

SparkFun Inventor's Kit for Photon