Set everything up to connect to my phone’s hotspot.
Desktop connected, I see the IP address and my desktop’s MAC address In fact I’m writing this while connected to my cell phone’s hotspot.
Device connected to cell phone
See the IP address in terminal program
Using Telnet, connected to device on port 79
Device was ready to serve me
Yay!
hit ‘c’ in the telnet program
Device connected to Cloud (breathing cyan/blue LED) - I think I’m going color blind 
After about 15-20 seconds, terminal program reports that it lost connection to host and the device is now flashing Green
That’s very odd (for me at least 
)
I’ve only got an MS Lumia 940 LTE with 8.1 and an MS Lumia 940 Dual Sim with 10 (insider preview).
I am regularly using the 8.1 hotspot and never had an issue, but haven’t tried yet with my sons Win 10.
Might need to try that some time.
But this is getting down to a level where some Particle pros might have additional tips what to try.
Let’s ping @Dave, maybe he’s got an idea (I hope I don’t offend him with an M$ issue 
)
You’ve been a tremendous help @ScruffR. I really appreciate you help, time and effort.
Thank you!
I’ll keep at this and is @Dave and/or other are willing to help, I’ll be most grateful. Yea, please see if you can use your son’s Win10 phone.
Just a reminder (in case Dave comes along for the ride).
- I use my ESP8266 boards with my cell phone’s hotspot all the time
- I use my Surface Pro, and a bunch of folks connect to my cellphone hotspot using cell phones and laptops all the time
- I’ve not been able to connect my Photons to other routers as well. So it’s not just my cell phone’s hotspot.
I don’t think this is an M$ issue honestly. The ESP8266 (I’ve had 5 connected to my phone for over 2 hours) works perfectly well.
So I’ve now tested with a few more Lumias 640 DS, 640 XL, 532 all running WP 10 and show all the same behaviour.
The Photon connects once very briefly (even in Safe Mode) but never gets registered with the phone (zero connected devices).
And hence loses connection and starts blinking green after about 20sec (on 532 it took about 60sec).
Since I have no such problem with my 640 LTE running WP 8.1 (tried swapping all SIMs of multiple carriers) I’d say Win10 might at least be contributing to your problem.
Ok, I can buy that. However, it doesn’t explain how all other appliances and the ESP8266 don’t have an issue.
By “appliances” I mean other phones, laptops, iPads, Surface etc.
No it doesn't - at least without enough background on what the Particles do while "not interacting" with the network and secondly what WP 10 expects a device to do to get recognized and stay connected.
For part one @mdma might have some info and about part two, further investigation would be needed which @mdma could bring forward at Particle to have this assigned to someone (given my clumsy tests and the interpretation of them are correct 
)
@ScruffR, I'm ever greatful to you for sticking with this over the weekend nonetheless. And also for going a step further and testing it out so now we have confirmation (And I'm not the only one with this problem so it gets ignored) that there is in fact some issue.
secondly what WP 10 expects a device to do to get recognized and stay connected
Just do what everything else does 
It works for them (and us).
If you have to specify the Encryption Cipher in the CLI (AES, TKIP etc…) then that means the device hasn’t successfully scanned the network to find out the security cipher in use. This is already a big thread and I’m not entirely sure where I can help. If not already doing so, please try 0.5.0-rc.1 firmware which had a fix to the wifi module.
The wifi connectivity is handled entirely by the Broadcom stack - this isn’t something we have control over. Is there anything unusual about the hotspot name (length/unusual characters)?
As to why the Particle device doesn’t connect but other devices do, that’s not really something we can answer directly. It could be that the Phone’s WiFi has some small areas of non-compliance to the wifi spec are ignored by some devices but cause others to fail. Of course, this is just conjecture - I’ll check on the Broadcom forums to see if there’s any discussion of devices not connecting to mobile hotspots.
Yes, I figured that out. But I use it so as to be able to "override". Just to test the various options one by one. Basically, I don't put the device in listen mode, so that I get the additional options.
No I haven't tried the new firmware. I saw folks talking about it but could find where to get it from. I went to the blog thinking I'd find a post there, but nope. Would you be kind enough to point me in that direction?
Just to be clear. It's not just my Windows 10 Phone. I can't connect to the Wifi router at work or one of my client's site (that's I've tried). I've talked/presented in a few places and in two places I've encountered the same thing. Also, at one of the locations a member from the audience offer up her iPhone hot spot and I couldn't connect to it either. The ESP8266 on the other hand connects to all of these routers/hotspots. Hope this information helps.
Thank you!
This is where you can find the binaries and the update instructions
https://github.com/spark/firmware/releases/
Thank you!
I’ll use the latest and report back here as to the outcome. Will probably be in the afternoon or so today.
I've performed my tests with already updated devices and it didn't make any difference.
I just now found an interesting behaviour tho'. When I use the Lumia 640 DS with WP 10 I can connect to it with my Lenovo Thinkpad 8.1 Pro 64bit just fine and the connection is stable.
But once I power up a Photon that tries to hop on that same network, it seems to connect at first but then drops off (as we already know) but further more even knocks my PC off too (although the WP 10 hotspot properties happily report my PC connected) and even stalls the hotspot for any new connection for other devices.
Do you see the same thing happen?
I'm sure there is some lack of resilience in WP10 (and possibly other devices as you see similar things with other routers/APs/hotspots) that contributes to the symptom.
But this also suggests that the Broadcom WICED used on the Photon might not always behave as a good citizen in all cases, which would well be something where @mdma might have better chances to get to the bottom of than us.
The WP10 hotspot might just be a good, reproducable test environment for that aleged issue.
As an important side note: The very same hardware (Lumia 640 DS) with WP 8.1 never had this issue (and 640 LTE WP 8.1 still hasn't), so it's definetly not the WiFi hardware of that phone.
But most likely on the software side, but same could stand true for Broadcom just the same.
Never thought to do this. I'll try that out and let you know how it goes.
I agree.
I agree.
Do you see the same thing happen?
Yes, I see the same thing happen. It's like the phone lost the ability to do DHCP or something. The Surface is still connected, but can't "go" anywhere.
So as an experiment, I connected my Desktop and my Surface to the phones hotspot. and then disconnected my Desktop to see if I could browse the Internet using my Surface, and I was able to. Yes, refreshed websites, visited new links, downloaded new email. Working as it should.