Antenna perhaps inducing Photon misbehavior?

Hello. So, I don’t actually have a problem (at this moment)… but I observed this so I wanted to report it. If you guys need me to do something specific to collect data for you that’s fine, I’ll do what you want.

I have two photons running LED strips. One is approximately 5’ from my WiFi, the other is in another room which is perhaps 30’ from my WiFi. I observed that once in a while the photon in the other room would lose connectivity, so I bought an antenna from your store. The two LED drivers are identical, and the circuit used is posted in the project share. Now, I’m an electrical engineer (up to the MS level) so I’m decently educated - but I work in flight test, so my circuit skills aren’t optimal.

The issue: I observed when I connected the antenna that after a few days of use (~1 week) one of my photons (I ordered 4 because I like back-ups) started to have issues. The issues were that the PWM output pins would sometimes randomly turn on. I noticed this in the middle of the night one day when my wife’s vanity light started pulsing randomly. I checked/double-checked/triple-checked my circuit and installation and couldn’t find any issues. As a precaution I installed some (unnecessary) pull-down resistors (because I figured perhaps somehow my pretty sensitive transistors were somehow getting a charge). Well, that didn’t work. So then I figured perhaps my photon was defective so I replaced it with another one. At first that one worked fine… but then after a week it started displaying the same behavior with an additional random reset. While doing this random reset the photon would flash red a few times, and then reset. This happened very very often (perhaps every five minutes for the short period of observation that I had).

Well… I scratched my head and compared the differences between the vanity circuit and the lamp circuit. The only differences were a button (hooked up to 5V on a “INPUT” pin) and the antenna. Well… I checked the input pin 10 million different ways (and it also has an external pulldown added) and that didn’t stop the random resets or the random triggering of my transistors. I switched the spots on the photon to different pins - and same result. But, once I removed the antenna… the issues went away.

So… is this sufficient to report anomalous behavior for the team to perhaps investigate with the antenna… or is there something additional I can provide to assist?

I hope to help! I love your product and I will surely buy more for other applications.

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While I’m not sure this is 100% of your issue, there are several threads discussing long term stability of the WiFi connection. When the WiFi connection fails, the Photon might reset (this is the red flashing).

The Particle team and several community members are hard at work hunting down these issues.

Yup different issues. Already read all these threads and actually incorporated some reset code. Mine exhibited the same behavior they show, but easy fix.