Basic questions regarding devices talking to one another

General
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  1. Can an Arduino (with an ethernet shield) somehow get a message to Particle Land - without being physically connected to a Particle device? I’m sure it must be possible but I can’t think by what mechanism besides IFTT…any tips?! Basically I’d like to use a now redundant Arduino with ethernet shield as another input device…all it would do is monitor one switch but then I’d like my Photons to be able to act on that input

  2. Can Photons talk directly to a Windows box? I know that you can use third party services like Pushover to send push notifications to a webpage - but it’s a real pain having to keep the webpage open to be sure the push notification comes up. Is there another way? Maybe not involving push notifications at all?

Thanks!

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  1. Arduino products won’t (easily) be able to directly talk to the Particle cloud the same way as native Particle devices and compounds would since they are not provisioned for it.
    But you can call all the documented Cloud API endpoints from your Arduino just as you would with any other computer via HTTP requests.

  2. Yes, Photons can talk to any box that’s connected to a network the Photon can access. The basic objects to do that would be documented as TCPClient, TCPServer and UDP. Additionally there are libraries that make use of these objects to provide higher level tools (e.g. HTTPClient, WebServer, …)

1 Like
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Thanks @ScruffR, but don’t I need to use HTTPS to call Cloud API endpoints? Which isn’t possible on the Arduino as far as I know? (The specific “Arduino” I have is an Ethermega)

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Yup, that’s right HTTPS is a big challenge for most (if not all Arduino’s) and also a stretch for Particle devices when you need it in user code.