Hi Guys,
I’m a NOOB with this electron board. I’m wanting to use a windows based IDE (such as NetBeans) to develop, compile and download to the board over USB. Could someone please assist me with this? so far I’ve found this board very cumbersome to use as it seems like I’m required to write my program on the web based platform (Particle build), compile and then download the .bin file. then transfer the .bin file to the electron via USB.
surely there is an easier method?
@gibbom, take a look at Particle CLI and Particle DEV. There is also a local toolchain you could use. If you do a search for Eclipse or Netbeans, you will find other members who have documented how to achieve this. BTW, welcome to the community!
Hi Michael,
I’m a fan of Visual Studio Code and I use it to code my projects for the Particle hardware. I documented how I did this in this writeup.
VS Code is kinda a hybrid between a text editor and an IDE, so you may like it (maybe you already do?).
Cheers,
Gustavo.
Thanks guys for your tips.
This electron system doesn’t seem as user friendly as I was hoping. I’ve just been going over the particle apps using the online web interface system and i’ve come stuck again at the second app “Web Connected LED”.
i’ve managed to download to my electron however I am having trouble working out how to control it from the cloud. reading over the literature it looks like i can set up a local cloud on my LAN, however when i followed the instructions the CLI just returned a whole list of error messages…finding this quite frustrating at the moment.
Hey, I understand your frustration. It drives me crazy when things are not working 
It takes time to learn 1: few key details for making things work and 2: setup your environment the way you like it.
However, there is a lot of people in this community willing to help you so don’t be shy and ask away! I have asked so many silly questions and they never kicked me out (ok, so far) 
Gustavo.
Have you got a specific need for a local cloud? If not, then why not just use the Particle cloud?
For development you can use sites like this (Disclaimer: I made that for fun, and it turned out to be useful) to quickly call functions/variables.
How you want eventually control your application depends on your needs. Since you interact over a standard REST API, you can pick virtually any programming language to do so.
Still, your Electron won't be easily connected to your local cloud anyways (not being on your LAN, of course). That approach would it way more complicated than using the Particle Cloud, IMHO.
Have you looked at installing Particle Dev and the CLI, as @peekay123 suggested?
@BulldogLowell, yes I downloaded the Particle Dev and CLI, I also downloaded VS Code.
I found that the Particle DEV wasn’t too useful as I was only able to compile and send the code to the particle via the GSM network (costly).
I couldn’t work out how to compile the code that I’ve written on the VS code package just yet to a binary file so that I can transfer to the electron.
I have been able to transfer a few programs compiled via the web app and transferred via CLI to the electron via USB. This has been good except a little “clunky”.
Does anyone know where I can find a resource for the arguments and functions that are included in the programming language? I want to be able to create arrays, index through them and store data from the GPIO into the arrays on an hourly basis (as a data logger)
I don’t need to use the electron for much more than a data logger for now (analog and digital data).
Any further guidance would be greatly appreciated!
You can use CLI or dfu-util to flash the binary you get out of Dev.
The language is C/C++ (with the Wiring/Arduino extensions), so there should be loads of resources online all over the net.
And for Particle specifics this would be the place to look
https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/electron/