I’m new to the photon.
I’m using a photon as an alarm at a remote location and only publishing if an event occurs. I’m using a cellular modem, so data usage is important.
So here is my question:
How much data is used in what I call housekeeping? I know that I can tell if it is online, so there must be communications back and forth.
Thanks
Another possible solution: The Photon supports manual system mode, which gives your application complete control over whether it’s active on Wi-Fi or with a connection to the cloud. The app could stay disconnected from the cloud until an event occurs, then connect. It takes a few to several seconds, so that might be a concern. Also, you’d need to figure out how you want to handle software updates and such because if it’s not connected to the cloud, you can’t flash new code to it remotely. But it can be done.
We deploy Photons and Electric Imp devices to monitor commercial equipment. Normally, we’re pushing data (several streams) once per minute to the cloud (Grovestreams). When we’re in a location that does not have WiFi, we use cellular modems ( MiFi type devices) from DataJack and we’re not seeing significant amounts of data. I’m guessing we’re seeing 50MB per month at the frequency we’re pushing and we’re seeing costs ~$10/month.
I don’t know if this helps. I’m not promoting DataJack, although they’ve have worked reasonably well for us. We’re still looking for a reliable, inexpensive M2M cellular network. The Electron looks promising, but I don’t know how cost-effective its data plan will be at our bandwidth.
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Thanks, I’ll look into that.
It also makes me think I should program a test message every so often to make sure everything is OK.thanks again.