Porter

I found the Porter app sometime ago, when the developer posted information about it in the Particle community forum.

The functionality the app offers is exciting. Being able to control and monitor all your Particle Dev Kits from your phone sounded amazing, so I volunteered instantly to test the app on Android. As it turned out, the app was both easy to use and powerful.

Installation

The app runs both on iOS and Android and costs few bucks. I installed it without issues on my Nexus 4 phone in seconds.

Setup

After installation you are asked for your Particle credentials:

Once entered you are presented with a list of all your Photons and Cores:

The list is pretty much self-explaining: green dots for online Particles, red dots for offline ones.

There is a hard limit on how many you can control at once: ten Particles. And there is workaround for this, of course: you can select the ones you want to use. Simple.

Since I have not reached that limit, this was not a problem for me.

Control and monitor your Particles

You can tap on any of your Particles, and start controlling them:

Or just monitoring:

It's worth mentioning that the application is lightning fast when sending requests to my Particles, even FASTER than my own, pretty basic native Android app.

Cool Detail

You can also control the theme of each of your Particle's individually:

You have four themes to choose from. This is a nice touch that can help you avoid confusion when you have a number of projects.

Advanced features

There is a bunch of advanced features that I did not use yet and hence did not describe here, like the ability to turn function inputs into buttons, keypads and drop-lists. This could make a maker's life easy when testing their projects.

If you want to know more about Porter's features, please go ahead and read the Quick Tour here.

Final words

All in all, Porter is today a great app for me, works without hiccups or issues, allowing me to interact with my projects in a very effective and quick way. It never hung on me or closed or failed to connect to the Particle Cloud, so as far as I can tell it is a rock solid app.

The app was created using the phonegap framework so you can expect a very similar UI experience in iOS and Android, if not the same.

And last but not least, If you want to find out more details about the app, here is the story behind Porter, and here the site of the app.

Great work Larry and the Porter team!

- Gustavo.

Help

If you require professional help with your projects, don't hesitate to write me a line about your needs at gusgonnet@gmail.com. Thank you!