We are a long time (albeit very small) Particle customer with about 100 cellular versions of our devices deployed with a mix of Electron and 3G/LTE Boron boards embedded. We were trying to reach Particle support about a device issue and they said, "Going forward, please reach out to the Particle Community for troubleshooting purposes." So here we are with this question.
We've had a 3G Boron in a device aboard a customer's vessel in Panama for about 3 months. It has power and has been in several locations where he had good cell phone coverage from all the 3G providers listed as working in Panama on the Particle site.
The embedded Boron has never connected to any 3G network (e.g. console reports "Last handshake: never connected").
We had a similar issue in Greece last summer, where one of our device's aboard a customer's vessel with an embedded 3G Boron simply would not connect to any tower while in Greece (but was just fine in other European countries when the boat moved).
We're just trying to determine if it's a bad piece of hardware and if we should send a replacement. But there's no point in sending a replacement if no 3G Boron is ever going to connect in Panama? We could also send an LTE replacement, but it seems unlikely from current Particle documentation that LTE is supported in Panama.
We can provide the ID, ICCID, IMEI, etc. if that helps, although it seems slightly odd to do so in a public forum (?).
Very grateful if anyone can provide any guidance on this. Thanks in advance for any and all assistance.
Have you looked at the logs from Cloud Debug | Troubleshooting | Particle? That would give a pretty good idea of what’s going on here, and if hardware is at fault.
As Gus mentioned, @support is the avenue to share the information you mentioned, but please gather logs first so we can make an informed decision.
Panama only supports one LTE, and one 2G band for the B524, so it’s a tricky situation unfortunately.
Unfortunately, the Boron in question is embedded in a customer's device aboard a vessel in Panama. So we are not able to physically access it. And even if we could ask the customer to, they would have to disassemble our device and mechanically separate the daughter board that holds the Boron
They have verified it is powered, but it never gets beyond blinking green on the status LED.
That's unfortunate.
Can you DM me the DeviceID please?
Does the unit have a battery connected? How far offshore is the device? What antenna are you using?
The unit does not have a battery attached, but none of the Borons in our shipped devices do. We have a very high quality 2 AMP DC power source in our device which supplies the Boron, plus there's a massive 1000uF capacitor in that power supply circuit. Power has never been an issue we are aware of with any other sold units (some of which have sustained use on power hungry 2G networks).
The antenna is stock (the Taoglas Cellular Flex unit that comes in the box).
where the customer reports full bars on regular cell phone with Tigo (formerly Moviestar), T Moval, and Claro. He does not have a SIM from Digicell (the other provider in Panama listed on the Particle site) to manually test with (we asked).
Thanks again for all the help with this, really appreciate it.
