During development with the Spark Cores, I would first claim and flash them at home, to ensure everything worked. Then I’d take them to where I wanted to deploy them, factory reset them ( hold both buttons, release the rightmost button, wait until fast flashing white, release ), reclaim them, and flash them once more.
I recently received my Particle Photons, but I’m having trouble with the same procedure. I claimed them today ( and they went through their firmware updates to 0.4.4 ), and then I tried factory resetting so I could have a fresh start, claim again, and flash again. The docs state that whilst holding the leftmost button, the LED goes through flashing magenta, flashing yellow, flashing green, flashing white, solid white, then rapid flashing white, at which point I should let go. However, it never makes it to fast flashing white - it goes through to slow white, then instead of solid white, it goes dark, then starts over at magenta.
Nonetheless, this seemed to match the diagram on the docs, so I tried letting go during the slow white flashing to get a full factory reset. The Photon goes straight to slow flashing blue, where it seems to be listening. It doesn’t broadcast its own wireless network as it did out of the box. Maybe one time out of five, I can set up its Wifi over USB, but mostly it gives me an error about not being able to communicate with the Photon ( internal device error, if I recall, will run it again tonight if exact error messages are needed ). If I hit the reset button, it mostly goes back to running old code from before I tried the factory reset, but sometimes it’ll just boot into listening mode.
In summary, factory reset doesn’t seem to be resetting to factory settings, but some strange intermediate setup.
Specs : I tried claiming first via USB using Particle CLI on a Mac, using particle setup
. This failed more times than it worked, various issues with connecting or disconnecting the Photon. The Android app had far more success. After factory reset, the Android app would give me Setup process couldn't disconNect from the Photon Wi-Fi network. This is an internal problem with the device
. From that point on, I could only get it back via USB with some faffing and a few failures and reboots - the Android never made it further.
Any help much appreciated.