Photon without the Cloud

I’m looking for a IoT device that, due to the nature of the data, has to be hooked to a private cloud platform. Can the Photon be used as a networked device capable of accessing whatever cloud or roll-your-own platform api/http/https services you want or is it tied to the particle cloud?

@manbat, with the Photon, you can:

  • Use standard TCP/UDP protocols without Particle Cloud interaction (non encrypted for now but is planned)
  • Use Particle cloud based interactions
  • Use a mix of the two

Particle also has a local version of their cloud and ParticleJS tools as well. Bottom line is you can do pretty well everything with the Photon.

Thank you. I’ll take a look a the local ParticleJS version. Hopefully that will also eliminate another barrier that exists in the restrictive environment I need to deliver into - no source code on third party platforms - which would seem to be the case with the Web IDE.

That restriction should be solved by local build (local toolchain), since Particle Build, Particle Dev and CLI do upload the sources to have them built on the cloud build farm.
At least if no source code only applies to your application/business code and does not include all the code running on your device (system and Particle/community libraries).

Storage of library and system source is not a problem for me because they are generic and you can’t glean anything from a library by itself to determine the specifics of how it is used. Business logic source is a different story, particularly when it comes to authentication credentials and specifics on the contents of the api payload.

For my situation, cloud compile should not be a problem as long as the source or executable is not stored afterward in any way that associates it with an account or something that links it to identifiable owner info. Quite frankly, I’d rather not get into the business of building local platforms.

Does the ParticleJS platform simply send the source to the cloud to compile and then download the executable without requiring a cloud account or account identifiable storage of source and executable? Thanks.

Just to clarify, ParticleJS is a javascript/node.js library to make interactions with the API easier. It’s not really a platform, nor is it a local cloud. Just a ‘wrapper’ for the API.
The local cloud on the other hand is a ‘light’ version of the Particle cloud, which you can host yourself. It doesn’t (yet) support all functionality, but the basic things are there. If you do a forum search, there are quite a few topics about it.

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Local building might sound more than it actually is.
e.g. Toolchain for Windows Installer makes it rather easy to set it up on Windows.

AFAIK you need to have an account to use the cloud build feature and the source files and binaries get saved at for a short while, especially when using Particle Build, but for the details you mkght want to get in contact with Particle staff (e.g. @Dave).

Hi @manbat,

It sounds like you want to use the local server spark-server ( https://github.com/spark/spark-server ). If you use the cloud compiler via the CLI, your source code won’t be stored, but the firmware binary will be stored for a short time (a few hours to a few days) in order for it to be downloaded right after the compile. You can always setup a local compile environment ( https://github.com/spark/firmware/tree/releases/v0.4.4 ) if you’d rather not send anything over the network.

Thanks!
David