Questions on multiple particle devices

Hi everyone
I’m new to particle and currently only have one photon and so I have a quick question regarding using multiple particle devices. So I have a few ideas for projects that will use a couple of photons (probably around 10) which will connect to the particle cloud and also probably store data in something like a AWS IoT dynamo database.

So in general if I have multiple particle devices operating at the same time I assume these would all be connect under the “same cloud”. So if I try to monitor them all at once on my dashboard and send basic commands to them all, can that be done(seeing which devices sent which variables)? I was reading about the difference between devices and products, in this case would I need to make a ‘product’ or can I leave it classed as devices?

Each will be running similar if not the same type of code, just the devices are located in different physical locations.

Thanks guys

Yes, the dashboard shows which device sent an event, but to send commands to them you would need to use the api as far as I know, theres no option on the dashboard to send events.

Hi thanks for the reply.

Do you know anything about how the differences between devices and products works?

Thanks

A product is a collection of devices running the same code, allows for easy firmware upgrade etc.
Its free for up to 25devices.

Also you can use the deviceID with the access_token to pass a 63 character string to a function with a URL request. Check out the Particle.function() firmware documentation to see an an example. I not sure if this would be helpful for you current project, but this would give you a way to interact with your photons without watching the dashboard for an event.

https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#particle-function-