I’ve been using Particle devices in the classroom for the last 7 years, teaching industrial design students about interaction design. For many years Particle was the only complete solution - an off-the-shelf prototyping system that allowed me to take students with no experience in electronics and have them prototyping interactive systems in under 3 hours. - thank you Particle.
In recent years however a number of changes to the Particle system has made classroom teaching increasingly difficult. These changes include:
- no more public publish and subscribe
- no ability to claim devices via the app if the devices are part of a product group.
- no creation of access tokens in the Web API
- no managing or reclaiming devices that aren’t physically present (unless they are part of a product group - but see above).
I know some of these changes have been in place for a number of years now, but their cumulative effect is taking its toll. If I can’t find a working solution I think I will have to shift to another platform.
This is what I used to be able to do:
- Students setup their own Particle account and claim a device.
- Students create an access token in the Web IDE and use it to prototype HTML to device interactions.
- Students publish and subscribe to fellow students devices to prototype one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one interactions.
- If students don’t unclaim the device at the end of semester (even if they don’t return it) I would claim it back via the console.
The key points here are:
- students have their own accounts
- students claim devices to these accounts
- I can view who has claimed the device and can unclaim devices as needed
- students can send messages to and from the device via HTML
- students can send messages to the devices of other students
If anyone has a way to do this within the current Particle system can you let me know?
Thanks,
Scott.