I teach interaction design and we have class sets of Particle Core, Photon and Argon devices. Ever since Particle introduced the group/product function I have been using it to manage the devices. It’s been great because if a student forgets to unclaim a device I can do this in the console (before this feature I had to track down the student!).
It worked fine in class because all devices connect to a Uni WiFi and students claim them within the Web IDE. Now, with everyone in lockdown, the students have the devices at home. I have asked them to use the Particle app to set the devices up to their home WiFi but they are unable to claim the devices, they get an error ‘the device is part of a product’.
Does the app not work with products?
Why not?
What’s the work around here?
This is partially solved. I have the students setting up the WiFi through the App and then claiming the device through the Web IDE. The only hassle here is that I have to share the device ID’s with the students.
But any comments on how to allow the App to claim a device would be great.
For sharing product devices with students, you can create an organization with yourself as the owner, and add your students as members of a team, and assign them access roles to limit their actions. This might give you the right combination of resource sharing and control. https://docs.particle.io/tutorials/product-tools/organizations/#roles
I don’t think you can set up a product devices from the app.
Thanks Brady.
That would be a good solution but we are on the starter plan (we have less than 100 devices) so I don’t think organisation control is available to us.
But I will look into it.
As for why you cannot use the Particle app in products: someone tinkering with the Particle app should not be able to “steal (in this case claim)” a commercial product using a Particle module. This would allow the user to reflash the firmware to something else entirely. In production environments the product would come along with a companion app to do user-related activities, but most likely firmware flashing would not be allowed.