Boron LTE Stuck Flashing Green

Troubleshooting
34

Hey there @Paul_M and @sdevo619,

Your frustration is completely understandable. I’m sincerely sorry this has been such a difficult process for you, as that is never our intention with our products or customer support experience. I am acutely aware and appreciative of the good will and patience you’ve shown in the pursuit of resolving this issue.

I want to start by emphasizing Dan’s prior comment, which is that we believe this to be a complex issue, or multiple issues, that is leading us to further investigate

  • (1) differences between various Device OS releases,
  • (2) differences in the AT command interface between the Boron (Gen 3) and Electron (Gen 2),
  • (3) firmware running on the u-blox modem, and
  • (4) characteristics of AT&T’s very new LTE M1 network itself (same expected coverage, potentially very different network behavior)

as potential root causes.

As an example – you have had better luck with LTE reliability on v0.9.0, while I previously observed symptoms on my personal Particle device similar to the one characterized by @sdevo619 (flashing green with +CREG 2,2 response in a previously working area) occur on v0.9.0 and seem to be resolved with an update to v1.2.0.

Next steps

  1. @Paul_M, as a first step, let’s confirm whether or not the issue you’re seeing is the same or different from the issue from the OP (flashing green with +CREG 2,2 network response). I will help organize the team internally to provide very clear instructions for how to collect these logs and provide them to us so that we do not waste more of your time.

  2. In the future, to better understand how variables may be contributing, we’d like to make sure we have a complete picture of the device displaying the symptoms which includes:

    • Device ID
    • Hardware platform (Electron, E Series, Boron, B Series)
    • Device OS version
    • Application code (Tinker preferred as a universal control).

Other notes

  • To @paul_m and @sdevo619 – we are appreciative of the time you’ve already spent troubleshooting this issue and don’t want to waste any more of it. If you do not already have a “control” device at your primary workstation for reliability testing, please PM me and I’ll work with our support team to get you one.

  • @Paul_M, rather than testing with v1.3.0 which includes no LTE specific fixes and might introduce new risk variables with the introduction of BLE, please compare v0.9.0 against 1.2.1-rc.3 (released yesterday) which includes various LTE-related bug fixes.

  • @Paul_M this post includes instructions for upgrading and downgrading Device OS versions, but has not been updated to include the Boron yet. I will ask @rickkas7 to do so, so that you can get your existing device back down to v0.9.0 for comparison testing.

  • @Paul_M for context, there is method to the decision to force update new devices to particular Device OS versions during setup. There are various software dependencies between the on-board hardware (nRF52840 and SARA-R410-02B) and Device OS that must be managed in order to ensure continued compatibility. More specifically, updating the Nordic SDK or u-blox modem firmware (which pulls in bug fixes for those components) occasionally requires compatibility modifications to Device OS that requires devices to run a particular Device OS version or later to function properly.

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