Can a bad program lead to lost Cloud connection?

Troubleshooting
1

Hi everyone, my name is Paolo. Fresh Photon owner total Arduino newbie.

I am still in the phase of experimenting with the simplest example.

I have a question for you. The context is an example from Seeed Grove. I get that’s another company and I’m not seeking support for that here, but I’d like understand if it makes sense that any kind of bad code/library can turn the Photon in state “breathing green” that is it cannot connect to the cloud.

To reproduce the problem it’s enough configure and run https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Grove_Starter_Kit_for_Photon_Demos/tree/master/Example%20-%2003%20Controlling%20the%20RGB%20LED%20with%20G-Sensor that turn accelerometer data into values for an RGB led.

What I see happening, after flashing successfully from the web UI, is that after a short time (less than a minute) of fiddlying with the accelerometer, the led stops reacting and Photon Led turns breathing green.

Can you help to explain what I’m seeing?

thanks

paolo

2

Yes, you can write code that renders your Photon inable to reach the cloud.

Unless you are using dedicated SYSTEM_MODEs or the new beta multithreading feature SYSTEM_THREAD(ENABLED) any code that prevents your program from leaving loop() while not calling delay() or Particle.process() will most likely break the cloud connection.

But if you've got a very fresh Photon and flashed it the first time, it might rather be that the auto firmware update might have come in your way
Read this

3

Thank you ScruffR, this has been very informative!