Can't flash Blink to Boron

Troubleshooting
1

Just received my Boron and have been able to setup it up with the IOS app!
Tinker works well, ie., I can turn on and off LED via D7. Great!

Loaded “Blink an LED” into the web IDE.
Verified that my Boron is selected in the lower right corner of the IDE screen.
I can click the light bulb and the Boron LED flashes colors. So I am connected to it.
I click the Flash ICON on the web IDE and the screen states,
Flashing code…
Flash successful! Your device is being updated…
Ready.

The LED on the Boron just Breaths Cyan, never changes. On the Photons I would see color changes and then a reset. Not so on Boron.

Like I said, new to Boron, am I missing something???

FYI Also monitored the console events and did not see any events as the Boron was being flashed.

Albert

2

Update

I have not heard anything but was playing around with Console diagnostics and noticed I don’t see Device, SIM Card or Cellular Network reporting. I only see Particle Cloud Reporting. A direction I am going to be looking at.

23%20PM
23%20PM1912×1176 139 KB

3

Have you tried hitting the RUN TESTS button?
Is the device breathing cyan when you do that?

You can try putting your device in Safe Mode and try to flash OTA again.
While this should work you can also download the application firmware binary and flash it via USB and CLI particle flash --usb firmware.bin -v

4

Yes I have.
It only reports about the Cloud. (It does say the cloud is healthy, but nothing else.)
The device is breathing Cyan and clicking the “Run Diagnostics” does not make any change to the LED status.

I will do as you ask about Safe Mode and flash OTA, and fall back to using USB and CLI if needed.

Thanks!
Albert

1 Like
5

@mstanley @ParticleD would one of you give @albertk836 a hand?

6

Made some progress…

Ending up using the CLI with the command…

particle flash --usb system-part1-0.8.0-rc.25-boron.bin -v

followed by…

particle flash --usb tinker-serial1-debugging-0.8.0-rc.25-boron.bin

I can now program the Boron via the Web IDE, (Blink) with it operating only on battery.

Also the LED flashed Red while it receives the update/program and then reboots as I would expect.

But still in Diagnostics, I only see “Device Cloud” information. No Sim Card or Cellular Network.

I feel I am talking to it via cellular because it is operating on battery unless it is doing something via BT.

Cellular Data usage is still indicated as “No data used yet”.

Is OTA programming free?

Albert

7

If you're updating your device, make sure to update to v080-rc.26 which was released today and includes several stability improvements for Mesh devices. Instructions for doing so are available here:

Can you try updating to rc.26 and let us know if you're still experiencing issues?

8

I upgraded the firmware to v080-rc.26. I still don’t see SIM Card or Cellular Network in Diagnostics.

Been running the following code for about a hour and don’t see any data usage.

Albert

void setup() {
 Serial.begin(9600);
 Serial.println ("Starting Up");
 pinMode (D7,OUTPUT);
 digitalWrite(D7, LOW);
 Time.zone(-6);
}

void loop() {
    
  if  (Time.second() == 0) {SendDataPacket();
      }
}

void SendDataPacket() // Routine ran every 5 seconds to publish Air Handler Status to Particle Photons ONLY
    {
        digitalWrite(D7,HIGH);
        Serial.println (Time.timeStr());
        Serial.println ("Sending Data To the Cloud");
        Particle.publish("BoronCheckIn", Time.timeStr(), 60, PRIVATE);
        Serial.println();
        delay (1000);
        digitalWrite(D7, LOW);
    }
9

@albertk836, in loop() Time.second() will be zero for an entire second. Loop() runs much faster than that so you will hit the Publish() limit of 4/sec very quickly.

10

That is why a put the delay (1000) in the publish routine. Or am I not thinking correctly?

Albert