High School Robotics Course using the Particle.io Mesh Devices Blog

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Just an update:

I will try to have a chat with @will on Friday.

I have started my 5th semester teaching Robotics using the Particle.io Photon, and it has been horrible. Nothing to do with the Photon, it is wonderful, but to do with Wifi connectivity of our schools newly upgraded Enterprise 2 Wifi system. Last year, I would have poor connections about once a week, and then only for a few Photons. This year I have only 3 photons getting stable connections and the rest connecting for about 5 minutes only every 20 minutes. Needless to say it has been a horrible experience. Many calls to the techs, who can’t, don’t know or won’t, make the needed changes.

Solution: Use 2 laptops with my enterprise 2 teacher login, setup Ethernet to Wifi hotspots from the laptops and then my Photons are golden. Unfortunate it took several wasted teaching weeks to find that solution.

Anyone who has been following this thread probably knows that I am trying to connect Multiple Particle Mesh devices, with websockets for fast internet connections and Cell Phone Machine Learning using Tensorflowjs in the browser for environmental analysis and decision making. I will have to wait until next semester to use the mesh networks but as far as the Machine Learning goes I just generated my ~50th Teaching example at:

https://hpssjellis.github.io/beginner-tensorflowjs-examples-in-javascript/interpretability/50-interpret-grey.html

Back to the Mesh networks, I have been out of the loop for about 6 weeks.

  1. Has there been any update on the ability for developers to use multiple Argons in one network (High Availability Networks)?

  2. Has anyone been able to get a few Argon’s working with OpenThread?

I saw @RWB @overcode link at Circuit Python on Argon? for connecting the nrf52840-dongle to CircuitPython which is really cool, but I work with Javascript not Python, plus as @rickkas7 points out, this solution totally obliterates the Particle Cloud and all firmware etc.

I just want to use multiple Argons with OpenThread or a Particle solution without a monthly cost like I thought I was purchasing for my school an entire year ago.