Boron LTE not connecting to 3rd party SIM

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I’ve been doing some testing with a Boron LTE and a 3rd party SIM. I have successfully flashed code OTA, sent events, connected to the cloud, well, everything worked fine. I had some trouble with that particular Boron (here is the post about it), and now I am trying to claim another Boron with the same procedure I followed before. Which is described in the docs.

I have tried with hybrid-0.9.0 and latest release v1.1.0. but I can’t get the Boron to connect to the internet. If I insert the SIM card to the old Boron it works, but it does not with the new one. I also tried downgrading to 0.8.25 as this post suggests, but that did not help either.

My SIM card is activated and has not reached its data limit. Is there anything else I can do? I mean, is there any new method or alternative to connect my device?

Thanks in advance.

J. Actus

2

Are you using AT&T by chance?

3

I am. AT&T IoT LTE-M.

4

Seems like with AT&T the Borons are expensive paper weights. I have 10 of them that are of no use because they don't seem to work with external AT&T sims. I have tested and tried everything imaginable for around 2 months and have given up on trying to get them to work with external AT&T sims. Good luck, let me know if you can figure anything out.

Also, worth noting. 1 of the Borons did work for some reason, though the same procedure and code on any other device will not work. Not sure if it's faulty harware or what at this point

5

Thank you for your response, it is useful to know that it’s not just me having trouble with this. It’s a shame because here in Mexico I can’t use Particle’s SIM card, and right now AT&T is the only LTE-M provider.

If I find something out I will post it here. I hope later on compatibility with 3rd party SIMs gets fixed.

Best of luck to you too!

6

Hey Jose, a couple of things here.

First of all, I didn’t see any explicit mentions of whether or not you set the SIM to be external in your user application, have you tried this?

Secondly, efforts are being made to get Mexico and Canada 1st party SIM support for CAT M1 LTE. I anticipate this will be sooner, rather than later. With a little patience, we might be able to get you online and running with Particle end to end. :slight_smile:

7

I do, I use the code in the docs, I just change the APN and run it for it to store the credentials.

#include "Particle.h"

#include "dct.h"

SYSTEM_MODE(SEMI_AUTOMATIC);

void setup() {
    Cellular.setActiveSim(EXTERNAL_SIM);
    Cellular.setCredentials("epc.tmobile.com");

    // This clears the setup done flag on brand new devices so it won't stay in listening mode
    const uint8_t val = 0x01;
    dct_write_app_data(&val, DCT_SETUP_DONE_OFFSET, 1);

    // This is just so you know the operation is complete
    pinMode(D7, OUTPUT);
    digitalWrite(D7, HIGH);
}

void loop() {
}

Well, I am looking forward to it! hope it gets here sooner rather than later!

Thank you for your response, regards. :grinning: