Cannot connect to electron, goes into DFU Mode

Troubleshooting
1

Hi everyone,

I am having issues with an electron that I have. I have had it programmed for a long period of time being used for testing a product of mine. I went to use it again last week and was unable to connect to it via Particle Dev Serial Monitor as I always have without issue. The issue was that as soon as I would try to connect, the electron would start flashing that it was in DFU mode.

I am running Mac OS 10.11.6 and do not recall any system changes since I last used it, but there may have been some system update.

Since then I have now updated to the latest Particle CLI, Particle Dev and tried updating nodejs, but had to rollback to an earlier version (6.8 I believe) in order to get Particle CLI installed as it was throwing some serial port errors.

Since doing all the above updates, I am able to run “particle update” on the electron and then “Particle flash --usb xyz.bin” to upload my firmware to the electron, but trying to connect with the serial monitor in Particle Dev still triggers the electron to go into DFU mode.

Has anyone encountered this before or have any suggestions as to what to try next?

Thanks,

Chris

1 Like
2

What USB baud rate are you using? The DFU mode can be triggered by a particular baud rate as a convenience (which I think is 14400 baud but might have changed). The USB baud rate is purely notional and does not control the transfer speed.

Otherwise if you using a windows PC, I would reinstall the two drivers.

3 Likes
3

Yes, looks like 14400 baud was causing part of that issue. I could have sworn I was trying 9600 and 19200 in my debugging and getting the same issues at one point as well…

In addition to that I was still connecting, but not getting any response back from the electron. I re-installed the latest version of nodejs and now everything seems to be back up and running as expected.

Thanks for the quick response!

2 Likes
4

That is too cool!

I just tested it out and it works, Where is this documented so that I can bookmark it.

My device was at work, and I remotely loaded dud code into it OTA, I was able to recover it using this method (I had team viewer and a USB connection to the device at work)

Regards
Marshall

1 Like
5

Here
https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#begin-

See the note about 0.5.0

2 Likes
6

Thanks for the link

@28800 it puts it into listening mode.
@14400 it puts it into dfu mode.

the DFU mode is not listed in the link

7

That's odd. A while back I had updated the docs to reflect 14400 too. I wonder why this didn't get applied :confused:

https://github.com/particle-iot/docs/blob/master/src/content/reference/firmware.md

8

My update finally shows up in the docs - the background worker which regularly updates the docs when new commits come in had stopped working :blush: