I know that when the Argon connects for the first time, it upgrades its OS. At home, it took me about 4m44s. I’m wondering if I have about 20 students trying this simultaneously, how bad will this be? Does anyone have any intuition / experience with this? Is the limiting factor WiFi speed, or some internal memory transfer inside the chip? How big is the OS, anyway? Right now my plan is to be cautious and try this with 4 students at a time.
On a related note, using the Web IDE the OS got upgraded from 1.4.something to 2.3, but I believe the current version is 3.2, or thereabouts. Will I miss much by not upgrading to 3.2? And why didn’t the upgrade go all the way to 3.2? I know I can do this with Particle Workbench, and will segue to that, but I’m just curious.
You will need to decide if you want to be on the latest long term support release (2.3.0) or the development release (3.2.0). I use the long term support and would recommend this to you unless there is a specific feature in the development release you want to use.
Also, for a class room of students, why not use the “particle update” command via USB? That would be the fastest.
Thanks for such a quick and helpful response, Chip! I didn’t realize that LTS versions are even numbered, I always just went for latest-and-greatest, but I found the documentation that describes their numbering scheme. As for the particle update, I’ll try that as well.
The JTAG Scruffr linked would be a good bet for setup. Setup time depends on a number of things including wifi connection. Trying it with four students at a time is a good idea.
Semi-related, I suggest using Particle Workbench over the web ide, especially for students who may be using VS Code in other classes.
Thanks, Colleen. We just use the Web IDE once, and then we’ll segue to Particle Workbench: although sometimes I wish that they would give the Web IDE some more TLC (ability to store projects in folders would be nice, for a start), because installations can be a hassle.
