Electron G350 connectivity (flash sequence)

All,

I just thought i’d update you on things my end.

I was contacted by Particle support yesterday (email). With an approach to diagnostics.

I plugged first electron (stock), and it quickly connected and has been breathing cyan ever since.
So - i attempted to connect second (this one had now been tweaked to have a giffgaff SIM with a 5UKP gigaplan and new firmware). Low and behold this one connected also - even quicker than first.

Both were left on overnight, but the giffgaff one had a dead battery this morning. The first electron is still breathing cyan. I put the second on charge and it connected within about 15secs, so its also connected for a second time.

In short - both are connected. I needed to do nothing but connect since particle contacted me, so I have not needed to run through any of the diagnostics.

How is everyone else doing with UK 2G 350’s?

PS: I have a third electon, but i am not going to connect it for a few days - will be interesting to see how “it” fairs with connectivity?

Too good to be true…

After a good solid 14+hrs (8pm -> 10am) , they are now flashing green (and sometimes cyan) again.

I feel surer than ever that this is a both signal+priority based (for my area at least).
(We have proven already that they make a connection (breathing cyan) without changing anything my end)

I am going to relocate one of these closer to the city to see if that helps.

Here is what I do know:
Connections seem to work better at specific times. Evening 9pm->11pm+ seem fine, as does all the way through the evening into morning up until about 9am+ when connectivity ALWAYS seems to be problematic.

I will also now start to follow the diagnostics process to attempt to identify the weak spot.

Hey all,
I’ve found that my electron is unreliable when plugged into a breadboard, as soon as I unplug it, and hit reset, it connects within seconds. If it’s plugged into the breadboard it mostly does not connect. Have tried two different breadboards.
It seems there’s maybe some RFI/EMC problem?

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I have my Electron running for two days with no problems at all. It is sitting on the breadboard, happily breathing Cyan and is shown in the dashboard.

One thing which is a bit weird is that the battery charge goes down all the time without the charger recharging it, although it is only about 83%. When I disconnect it from USB and replug it again, the red light will go on for a while. But it will go out before reaching 100%. So there seems to be either a measurement error or the charging does not work correctly, or I don’t understand how the charging should work.

They set the charging voltage low to be on the safe size for batteries in temps above 45C.

I also only see the SOC go up to about 83%. The charging voltage is set to 4.11v I’m pretty sure. It’ needs to be changed to 4.20V at least for the fuel gauge to go up to 100%.

There is code to do this but I have not attempted to change it yet.

I started a thread here about this: Changing Battery Charging Settings - Electron

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@RWB, Thanks for the information, good to know!

I've found that my electron is unreliable when plugged into a breadboard, as soon as I unplug it, and hit reset, it connects within seconds.

As odd as this sounds it solved the problem for one of my electrons, haven'd tried it with any others yet.

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Just a background on this.
Breadboards add some extra capacitance which might in combination with high frequency and common inductance of your setup lead to noise.

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@BDub perhaps we need to be pulling up unused GPIO pins to prevent them from floating and picking up stray capacitance?

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@BDub1 or maybe @BDub ?
I live in Australia and have a G2 G350 Electron (Kickstarter version) exhibiting the same symptoms as @laughlinez and others.
I have tried all the steps as described above but NOT touched the SIM card yet.

What I have noticed is that near some towers I get the fast cyan/red/slower cyan pattern but outside my home about 300m from a Telstra tower I only ever get green blinking (with occasional drop back to blue blinking). When green blinking it doesn’t seem to use any data but when cyan it does.

Do you want me to save any information or take photos before I inspect the SIM card connector?

Not sure which time zone you are in but I will only be awake for an hour and I will resume tomorrow my time. How does one raise a support ticket?

@BDub @laughlinez @wdj
Woohoo…!
Breathing cyan! I simply pulled it out of the breadboard - didn’t touch the SIM card connector.

I have been able to claim it.
Now to test it at home where I only ever got blinking green (I’m currently near a tower that it did respond to with cyan blinking before).

@wdj - I am going to play with some pull-ups or caps to see if they can reduce the apparent noise effect.

UPDATE
Yep it breathes fine at home outside… but not inside my office away from the window. It took a while blinking green and then finally started breathing cyan. It is still out of it’s breadboard, will have a go at some fiddling with pull-ups/downs or caps? Hmmm need to read the specs again.
Anyone got any comments about what might be best and which pins might be most likely to be causing the problem?

Hence the statement :wink:

Hi There,
can confirm that here in London - removing my 2G electron from the breadboard did temporarily fix the problem of fast flashing cyan and then short burst of red. It was breathing cyan and connecting to the cloud properly. But then maybe 10 minutes later it lost the connection and cycling the fast cyan blinking with red burst again.

So tried then pressing down on the SIM and reset and it breathes cyan again. Looks like a physical issue to me.

Hi All,

Whats the status on this? I have had my electron running fine for a day or two and then it starts blinking green… I have tried two different SIM cards with the same result. Works for a while and then stops. Taking the SIM out and sliding it back in seems to solve the problem for a short time and then it comes back.

My take is that the SIM holder is poorly designed and allows the card to bend itself outward eventually loosing good contact.

Bummer when we spend loads of time trying to make our App bullet proof only to have failures like this, for the moment its a no go!

Has their been any official word on this from the Particle team ?

Thanks,
Serge

Hey there @ssozonoff – if you’d be willing to capture the device logs on the device, we can tell you the exact reason that the SIM is blinking green. Unfortunately, even within this single thread the contributing causes have been everything from issues activating the SIM to no reception to a damaged SIM connector to the wrong hardware, so it’s impossible for us to diagnose the root cause based on the symptom alone.

The best route forward is to email our support team through our Support Portal at support.particle.io. You should get a response within one business day or so–please let me know if you don’t!

Happy to do so however I use a 3rd Party APN. Looks like I am going to have to install a local toolchain and everything to get this to you ?

Does the electron-troubleshooting binary exist doe 0.5.2 ?

Serge

You should be able to flash lower version app firmware to higher version systems.

The instructions for the Electron troubleshooting app are [in this document] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U_Wzy2SPRC3hZnKtw8d6QN2Tm8Q7QwtEbSUAeTkO3bk/edit).

The 0.5.1 binary linked to from that page can be used on 0.5.2.

Also, you don’t need to build your own electron troubleshooting app binary for use with a 3rd party SIM. You can set the 3rd party SIM APN information using the D command at runtime.

Thanks but the troubleshooting App does not really help since my issue is random and non repeatable.

It works perfect for a random amount of time and then all of a sudden I get a blinking green LED. Usually if I power down everything and slide the SIM out and back in again then it works again for a Random amount of time. Could be days could be hours…

I would need to run my App with the 3rd Party APN and DEBUGING enabled in the firmware…