I’ve got a Photon that I’ve used successfully for years, but I’ve had it off-line for a while, and just now tried to bring it back on-line. I put a new (VERY simple) app on it, and have not been able to get it to behave right at all. It will never go into the breathing cyan state. Instead it cycles through every imaginable sequence of LED colors. I’ve tried a factory reset and a couple other things I’ve found on-line. I’d love it if someone could help me put it back in factory fresh mode.
Thanks very much! Yes, I just now put it in DFU mode and flashed the Tinker app onto it (via the CLI) to verify.
But no luck putting it in Safe mode
Interesting point…
If I ping it from the console it sometimes says that the device in “on-line and connected” and a few seconds later it will say it can’t be reached. But it never does get into the breathing cyan mode. It does seem to just continuously go through every possible combination of colors and flashes.
Download the four files below form Github. Make sure to download both Part1 and Part2 for photon firmware.
Install and update Particle CLI on you computer
On OSx… open Terminal (or CLI in workbench)
Connect device to you USB port
Make sure devices is in DFU mode (flashing yellow)
In terminal type: particle flash --usb and then simply drag the downloaded files into the terminal (one by one) window. It will automatically enter te file name and path. The device should remain in DFU mode after each flash, unlike Particle Doctor.
Hit Enter. When done, repeat with the next file, in this order:
Of course there are newer versions of device OS, I juist dont have the link. Should be easy to find on GutHub, or start with these, you can update afterwards
I unplugged it and plugged it back in to see whether it would go on-line - despite not yet having the bootloader or tinker app. It doesn’t currently show up in my device manager, and the LED quickly goes to a constant white (not flashing) mode.
Thanks. But I just went ahead and configured it to my home wifi network - and that worked!? So I went into the console on my laptop and flashed Tinker - and that worked!?
So it currently seems to actually be working perfectly (which makes me very happy and appreciative). Do I still need to try to flash the bootloader anyway?
FYI and in my experience... you can --force to override if it is not working properly yet. Also update the device OS. If all goes smoothly, I recon you are good to go
The problem with --force is that you can also forcefully flash an incompatible binary and that will definitely not help your course.
But when you have the correct binary --force will not be required
One possible reason for being unable to flash the bootloader binary may have been that the previous version did not support DFU flashing for that.
In older versions you needed to flash the bootloader via Listening Mode and particle flash --serial
