I have a Boron that has inexplicity gone off line after behaving perfectly for 3 years. Unfortunately, I am 300 miles away from the device and am relying on a third party to tell me what the LED behavior is. He informs me that the status LED is flashing blue (not green); it is not "breathing" blue as it does when connected to the cloud. Am I not correct that flashing blue rather than green indicates that the Boron is connected to cellular service but not to the cloud? If so, what would you suggest I do to further diagnose the issue (I have, of course, tried rebooting the thing but without effect)? BTW, the charge status LED occasionally blinks yellow even though there is no backup battery connected. I don't know if that is normal behavior or not, but if not, might that be somehow be related to my connectivity issue?
You mean it's blinking light blue (cyan), not dark blue, correct? One thing to try is to unplug it completely including the battery for a minute instead of just trying to reset it. The reset button does not reset the cellular modem.
If it's blinking cyan with one orange blink, one possibility is a device key issue, which is rare for the Boron. For 2 blinks it could be a temporary issue with the carrier. Blinking green is connecting to the cellular tower, but blinking cyan is establishing a PDP session for packet data. Even more rare would be a misconfigured SIM, especially since it previously worked. 3 orange blinks is rare for cellular, but can happen on Wi-Fi for networks with a firewall blocking the Particle cloud servers.
Yes, Rick; blinking cyan. There is no battery so unplugging the power supply should have accomplished the full reboot.
I suspected a carrier issue but it's been going on for over 30 hours now so I doubt that. But is there any way to force the Boron onto a different carrier (that doesn't involve altering firmware since, of course, I can't get to the thing when its off line).
The application does not involve any local network at the site of the Boron, so no WiFi, firewall, etc.; straight to AT&T.
I will ask the on-site person to take a video of the LED blinking.
Tried to upload a video here but apparently that is not allowed. I'll try sending it via email
Darn. Since I can't upload or email the file, I put it in DropBox here: Dropbox
I don't see an orange blink in that video, it looks to me like it's just blinking cyan.
The orange charge LED blinks briefly, but that's normal if there is no battery connected.
I thought that the charge LED was what you had been referring to. I didn't know its blink is normal normal (don't recall seeing it before). But since the blinking cyan is indicative of successful connection to cellular data but not the Particle cloud, what else might explain the Boron being off-line. BTW, cellular signal, while not terribly robust, has been rock-solid for about 3 years right up to the Boron going off-line.
Any other ideas?
Cellular signal is a possibility; the act of connecting to the cloud requires a number of back-and-forth handshakes, and if either direction is losing packets, it might never connect.
Because it's not connecting to the cloud, you can't really determine anything from the cloud side.
If the device were closer, you could install debugging firmware that logs the connection logs to USB serial debug, but that doesn't sound like a viable alternative.
Rickkas7 says that if my Boron is "blinking cyan with one orange blink, one possibility is a device key issue." That is what my Boron is doing (Dropbox). Is there a fix short of replacing the Boron? Note that I am 300 miles away from the device and while I can get someone on-site to press a reset button or similar, they would not be able to perform a factory reset or a replacement and start all over with initial setup. I'd like to avoid the 10-hour round-trip drive.
I don't see an orange blink in that video, it looks to me like it's just blinking cyan.
The orange charge LED blinks briefly, but that's normal if there is no battery connected.
Hi again Rick. I am going to have to take that 10-hour drive on Monday. My first activity once on site will be to swap the Boron with a maintenace spare that we bought 3 years ago. If that one won't connect to the cloud either, then I'll have to try your debug suggestion.
Can you point me to instructions on how to install debugging firmware and how to extract the resulting log(s)?
One other note that may or may not be of interest: after powering the Boron off for several minutes and then plugging it back in, its reconnection to the AT&T network takes only about 10 seconds, i.e. the cellular signal strength appears to be very healthy.
If you've added:
SerialLogHandler logHandler(LOG_LEVEL_TRACE)
to your firmware, you can just connect the device to a laptop with a USB cable and use particle serial monitor.
Otherwise, you can flash cloud debug from the CLI.
But yes, I'd bring a spare device in case the device has a hardware problem.
Great; thanks for that.
OK Rick, here is a status update. I drove the aforemntioned 5 hours yesterday to swap Borons. Our spare was brand new, still in its static bag. It took all of 15 minutes to set up. It connected to the cloud almost instantly and I flashed my firmware to it. Our application is now back to normal operation.
The conclusion, of course, is that the Boron that had been functioning perfectly since late '21 went kaput, i.e. its going off-line was not a function of either our locat AT&T LTE service quality or the Particle Cloud.
So the next question is: might there be anything that can be done to restore the prior Boron to healthy operation, e.g. perform a factory reset maybe? If not, is there any recourse, i.e. warranty, that is available this late in the game? Obviously, we need to have a maintenance spare on hand.
That is past the end of warranty, however getting the logs as mentioned earlier or using web device doctor may provide clues to what happened.
If I disassociate that Boron from our account, perform a factory reset and the thing appears to be back in working after a new setup process, can I reallocate it with our account?
Yes just add the Device ID back to your product, as long as the account you set it up with is a team member of your product.
Once added, you may need to unclaim it from the account that you set it up with, depending on how you normally configure your product devices (unclaimed, claimed to a single account, or another way).
Oops; forgot to update you Rick. I connected the bad Boron (BB) to my Macbook via USB using Opera but even though it powered up, the web device doctor couldn't "see" it. So I have given up on any attempt to figure out what happened to it or trying to revive it. Ordered another.