Particle Photon projects with very limited internet connectivity

General
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Hello Particle friends!

I am relatively new to the Particle family, but I have a fleet of particle photons already and they all work fine. I am building out my prototypes for my project and that all works fine - coding and deployment are crazy simple. I have built particle.variables, webhoooks, and all the other internet connected stuff just fine and been able to see results from my sensors and all kinds of cool things. I have switched my photon from my wifi hotspot on my phone to my home network and back and that works fine. (Actually a little too well)

The meat if this issue is this: I want to put a Photon where it will only have connectivity when I come over and turn on my phone’s hot spot. I don’t want to lose the (very) infrequent data points it is collecting in the interim. I have scoured the forums for a couple of days about EEPROM, SD, and other means of writing data for storage, but those seem like overkill if I am collecting maybe 40bits of data 2x per day and the device would never go more than 5 without a connection. I cannot find a definitive answer to the memory size and the question of “how long do I have before I crash the buffer or overwrite data points” is part of this, but my question is more basic:

Is the Photon platform even the right choice for something that is unlikely to have connectivity for extended periods of time? I love the platform, and for my planned commercial project it may not be an issue, but I am thinking longer term and don’t want to invest a ton of time into a non-starter.

Also, part of this stems from the fact that while I love IoT, I am a HUGE fan of taking the “I” out of it whenever I can for both security and practicality reasons, and the Photon platform feels very very internet-centric.

Thanks to all the very smart folks who have helped me already, and I look forward to your feedback.

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I’m not quite sure what your problem is. For the specific question, you don’t need to do anything special to store a maximum of 400 bits; it could be stored in a regular variable, or you could use retained memory to keep it safe in the event of a power failure (with a backup battery). The Photon has 4kB of retained memory, so that would last a long time at your use level. To the more general question, it sounds like you still want to be able to connect the device to your phone to get the data out, so it seems that a Photon is still a good fit for that use. It wasn’t clear to me whether the stuff you mentioned at the top of your post (using Particle.variable, webhooks, etc.) is a different project or part of the one where you have limited internet access.

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The Electron connects to Cellular so it could always be connected when you want it to be regardless of WiFi access.