No, unfortunately. My tests we related to the EEPROM emulation in flash, not full flash erase. I do not know the root cause of the particular issue you describe.
Bug Bounty: Electron not booting after battery discharges completely
Can you share details of the EEPROM emulation flash erasure? My code is using EEPROM emulation. Iāve only seen the full flash erasure issue once, and that was shortly after I added EEPROM emulation to my code.
The old EEPROM code unlocked flash and wrote a status at every boot. In some conditions like dying battery the write would fail. The behavior of the code at next boot was to erase the whole EEPROM. It was challenging to reproduce and I donāt understand the details of the failure. The new EEPROM code doesnāt write every boot and verifies writes.
Does this help?
Is the new eeprom code (that doesnāt write at every startup) all ready released in one of the latest firmwares, if so in what version?
Does that mean that this was leading to people having the problems that their Electron did not boot up after a complete discharge? So then it would mean that this āBugā is fixed, right?
BTW this is not unlikely - we had a few sensors which use 5V but also operate normal (at least once) when using 3,3V. But after a second boot up the sensors firmware is destroyed by the fact that the supply voltage was to low and certain strange things did happen on the device - We have overlooked the wrong power supply because even with 3,3V itās working as expected - at least once
So, what are the symptoms of this? I have two electrons that Iām fairly sure have completely discharged and now no longer boot. When a known-good battery is plugged in, the D7 LED is dimly lit and no other system activity occurs. Plugging the device into a computer does not produce the expected āUSB Device Insertedā sound.
I donāt think anybody knows exactly what is happening to cause the firmware to be overwritten when the battery goes empty but it can be eliminated via code that prevents the Electron from running when the battery SOC drops to a predetermined level.
Sometimes the Electrons are not affected by this and some are so itās weird.
Iāve never killed an Electron this way luckily but others have.
Just my 2 cents after following this for some time now.
This is happening reliably for me. My devices are solar powered. The solar panel is oversized so that it charges even on cloudy days, and when I give these things to people who install them, they often sit on a desk for several days or over a weekend. And they never come back online.
I dug out my ST-LINK2 and weāll see if I can fix this.
Are you using any code put the Electron info deep sleep when the SOC hits something like 20%?
I already had several. I didnāt buy any to replace this one, thankfully. I had bought one as part of the kickstarter campaign, and the antenna connector fell off the board after a single use, which is clearly not intentional, though some people tried to tell me that I should have expected it.
I bought 4 asset tracker kits this year for a thing at work, and when the first one had these symptoms I chalked it up to hardware failure. then today it happened to a second, and then I knew it was a software fault. So I started looking for a fix, and found it. Though I donāt like that this is a mysterious bug.
Iāve got this board blinking green and cyan now, and thereās a problem that I think is related to my product configuration. Iāll figure it out or Iāll start a new topic about that specific issue.
Hey @naikrovek - would be great of you share the code running on your devices!
Just because I am having quite a few solar powered Electrons in the field and quite often they are running out of battery but do come back every time ā¦
I wasnāt able to reproduce the issue on my side - even with quite a few attempts ⦠so it definitely has something to do with the code running on those devices!
No, not using EEPROM.
The code is here: https://gist.github.com/naikrovek/330fb772c3c00fb34ef60bea73d120ee
Aaargh, this just happened again. This is a 100% repeatability problem, in my case. It rained here over the weekend, and I guess the solar panel isnāt mounted in an ideal position, so it wasnāt able to charge the battery sufficiently. Battery drains fully = dead Electron.
The code I am running is linked in the previous post.
Fortunately the PoC Iām running is nearly over so I wonāt have to fight this much longer. I would be pulling my hair out if I had to deal with this long-term. Actually Iād probably mandate that 100W solar panels were used (rather than 10W) so there would be no possibility of battery discharge, even on the cloudiest of cloudy days.
I do hope for future users of this platform that the problem is resolved. If thereās anything I can do to help Particle work out whatās going on here, please let me know.