Confused about Blynk! Particle Photon

Need Help With My Project
1

So I’ve got a few Particle Photons dotted around my home. They are doing things like monitoring doors and windows to check they’re closed/locked when they should be. They are also doing things like monitoring the bell push on the front door and operating the doorbell if the push is…well…pushed. They publish events to the Particle Cloud to talk to each other. Most of my Photons also have an MP3 player attached. (DFPlayer Mini). Most of them are also running TimeAlarms which constantly check the time against a list of “alarms” and perform actions when the time matches. So a fair bit going on in my loop already.

I’d really like an attractive GUI dashboard that I can view on my iPhone showing the open/closed states of the various locks/doors around the house and I think Blynk might be that dashboard. I looked into Losant but I can’t get my head around whether or not that’s an iPhone dashboard too! It seems maybe not.

HOWEVER, I understand that I’m not supposed to do much of anything in my loop() apart from service Blynk. So…how am I supposed to run the code that monitors my various inputs, controls my various outputs, plays MP3s and checks the alarm array for any alarms needing to be run? Would I need one Photon dedicated to running the Blynk app?

THANKS

2

With timers and timed functions, normally with BlynkTimer…

http://help.blynk.cc/getting-started-library-auth-token-code-examples/blynk-basics/keeping-your-void-loop-clean

… However, in your case you need to use Particle’s timer commands… more info somewhere on Particle’s site.

3

Just to keep it simple, you could add another photon that would collect the necessary data from all other devices (and control them), and integrate it with Blynk. This is based on the information, that your devices are already talking to each other.