Continuous losing connection

Troubleshooting
21

@david_s5 Hey @BDub is experiencing the same issue when using his Phone as the WiFi Hotspot. Its something that the hotspot does that causes the Blue Flashing lockup.

@BDub Are you with Verizon? ATT? I'm on Verizon. What Hot Spot app you using? I'm using FoxFi.

22

Thanks I was looking for this thread. ATT with TetherMe app

23

I assume this issue has not been completely resolved?

I had the disconnect problem last night. For some reason my Wifi AP was not passing data, and my home devices lost net. I rebooted my Wifi AP and net was restored, but my Spark remained in flashing blue mode all night. In the morning I reset the Spark; a power cycle brought it back to breathing cyan.

24

Not sure why it got into the blinking blue (listening) mode.

If your wifi connection dropped, your core will simply blink green and wait to he connected to wifi.

Thereā€™s no user intervention if the wifi got dropped and restored after.

25

Spark was blinking blue before I rebooted the Wifi AP. Like the examples in the thread above, WiFi was up, but the data path broke down at the house (no external connectivity to the net), which pushed the Spark into blue blink mode (it may have blinked green prior to that, but I was not in the room to see it). It was in blue blink mode for an hour before I rebooted the Wifi AP, and restarted the house data path ā€” but the Spark never reconnected, it just kept blinking blueā€¦

26

Weird stuffā€¦ Iā€™m gonna do that to my core and observe the behavior.

As far as I know, it just blinks green whenever I donā€™t allow internet access to the core.

Can u share what happened like the router died or thereā€™s no internet etcā€¦

What core type and your factory reset firmware version if you know :slight_smile:

Added my core Mac address on the block list to deny internet access. But maybe not the best way to replicate the problem.

Thereā€™s an LCD displaying the millis() and continues even after the core had no internet access. Would be nice to be able to see the rough time-out should it even go to blinking-blue!

Let me see what happens to the blinking green and report back tomorrow morning :smiley:

27

Seems like we have a positive!

@zachary, The core ended up blinking-blue after 2627879 ms --> 2627.879 s --> 43 minutesā€¦

Did i do the conversion correctly?

https://vine.co/v/MMvvrOd6wnx

Maybe you can share with us if this was intentional so as to be able to connect the core to another wifi network via tinker app by automatically entering listening mode.

I personally would have it to just be in blinking blue and wait for wifi to be back on since wifi network doesnā€™t change that often :smile:

28

Wow, most excellent, thanks for trying it. So if Iā€™m understanding your experiment correctly, you block net access (but not Wifi), and after 43 minutes, it went into blue blink mode. And when you restored net (removed MAC address block), the Spark did not renegotiate and get back on line. Maybe itā€™s exponential back off taken to the extreme :smile:

29

Yes bingo :smile:

I did a test again last night:

seems like the time it takes to turn blinking blue is somehow not consistent.

30

Just wanted to mention that this issue is on the list to fix:

You can ā€œwatchā€ the github repo and be notified when updates to issues occur if you desire :wink:

31

So, the new 0.2.0 firmware was just released, which was supposed to fix the ā€œblue flash of deathā€. Can you repeat your test with 0.2.0 and see if notice any issues?

32

Me? Or who? :smiley: your wish is my command :wink:

EDIT:

  1. The :spark: core looks for the next available wifi network and connect to it when it disconnects from the previous

  2. Still testing whether Smart Config (blinking blue) get triggered but i highly doubt so. Thereā€™s a colour change to Blinking cyan --> Blinking green when the disconnection happens :smiley:

Iā€™m gonna stop the test since it way surpassed the time it took to end up in Smart Config (plus the fact that i watched the issue conversation and @zachary did a commit to resolve this!)

Honestly, I doubt itā€™s gonna happen since we already found the root cause and no where else is gonna trigger Smart Config besides the MODE button :wink:

On a side noteā€¦thereā€™s an occasion blinking cyan during the blinking green which might be something undocumented yet.

@dermotos, youā€™re the man with the real life application thatā€™s gonna be affected so hope to hear (or not hear about the issue) from you soon!