Collaborating on Electron firmware development for a shared device that is part of a Product

The Archive Product Creation
1

Hello,

We are a small startup company that currently owns one Electron. We are trying to collaborate on firmware development for the Electron, however since each of us has a separate Particle Cloud account, only one of us can claim the device. This means that since @SCM claimed the device that the other person (me) cannot compile code for that device using Particle Build or Particle Dev, since these IDEs require you to select a device and firmware version to use for compilation.

The device is registered under a “Product” that we created, however it doesn’t appear that the IDE has the ability to choose a “Product” as the target device type for compilation.

Presumably, a company developing a product using the Electron would get around this problem by simply buying an Electron for each of its developers that they can individually “claim” and start tinkering with.

The only other way I can think of to collaborate on development of firmware would be to claim a single device on a shared Particle account. That way each developer would simply log into that account (in web IDE or Particle Dev).

Is this accurate? Is there a way to “share” a device among more than one registered Particle user? Is the best practice to create a company “super user” that “claims” each Electron asset that the company owns?

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The typical method is to for each developer to have one of each device type (Photon, Electron, P1, etc.) registered to their own account, and typically on their own desk so they can access the debug USB serial and so forth.

The other option is to use the Particle CLI to compile. The CLI allows you to compile for device types you don’t have registered to your account:

https://docs.particle.io/reference/cli/#particle-compile

You can still use whatever editor you prefer, including Particle Dev. Also, the resulting binary from particle compile can then be uploaded directly into the product dashboard where you can lock and flash your shared test device.

3 Likes
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Thanks for the response! This makes sense. There’s not much point developing firmware unless you have the Electron sitting in front of you to test the firmware, hence each developer should have their own toy.

Good point about compiling from the CLI with specific parameters. This line allowed me to compile for electron:

particle compile electron --target 0.5.0 my_project