I am hoping to start a thread for those who are beginners to the Electron and Particle in general.
I am a newbie and trying to get my feet off the ground. I just got an Electron and got it connected. I successfully loaded the Tinker appt example and loaded the app on my phone and can turn an LED on and off. I also used Particle.publish() to post in the logs when he LED is on and off. Now onto something more advanced…
I loaded the Function-Variable example app. It says on the cloud I can read the analog values of the photo resistor and from the cloud turn the LED on and off. Where in/on the cloud do I do this? This is where I get lost. I’m sure there is something I am missing or overlooking but not sure what or where.
Thanks for the help!
Hi Tim,
There are various community resources to help you call Cloud functions and retrieve Cloud variables. I have personally written this application: http://projects.harrisonhjones.com/phpSparkDashboard/index.php and I use it from time to time. You can grab your access token from the Web IDE (click the “Settings” icon in the lower left) and then paste in the text box on my site. There are lots of other community resources (I know @moors7 has written one). I want to caution you a bit; your access token should be treated similarly to a password. My site doesn’t currently work over HTTPS (something I plan to fix soon) and I don’t use OAuth to grab a temporary password (another fix I’ve been meaning to do) so, in the mean time, just be aware. I can promise you I don’t do anything nefarious with your access token but you should refresh it after use with my website just to be safe.
I’m not trying to scare you off, just teach you a bit of background on access token security. Let me know if you have any other questions. I’m here to help 
Hopefully soon we will have a build in feature in the official Particle dashboard to call functions and retrieve variables
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Quick tests that don’t require you to provide the access token but need your login can be found here
http://suda.github.io/particle-web-interface/
http://jordymoors.nl/interface/ (as mentioned by Harrison)
Thank you both for the info. I will check those out and see how far I get. I will post back here with any hangups or questions I have. I was thinking that Particle had a place in it’s own cloud like where you see logs from using Particle.publish() that I could go to but I guess that is not the case? As a beginner I find information regarding it to be very vague but maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right places?
Anyhow thanks again! I appreciate all the the help I can get.
That Particle place to see published events would be
https://dashboard.particle.io/user/logs
But these logs will only update while you are logged in and don’t keep track in the background when you are not “watching”.
Thanks for the tip on that!