My application controls a pump in a water well which supplies water to a very large storage tank. It is located on the top of a mountain in Black Mountain, North Carolina. A Photon sends requests for more water to a Boron at the well.
Black Mountian has been devastated by hurricane Helene and there has been no power for days, but it is hoped that power will be restored soon. Even if power is restored, there is the possibility that Internet service may not be for some additional time. Obviously, without Internet (via WiFi) the Photon will not be able to perform its role.
Can anyone think of a way to embellish the firmware running on the Photon to connect to a cellular hot spot until Internet service via WiFi is restored (we could always place a cell phone nearby)?
The Photon can connect to a cellular hot spot, just by adding the hotspot credentials to it. Note, however, that the Photon in particular consumes a lot of data because it does a cloud ping every 10 seconds, unlike the Boron, which does it every 23 minutes. The Argon pings every 25 seconds.
With the Argon and Boron using BLE and outdoor yagi antennas I've gotten to 1320 feet (400 meters, a quarter mile) between the devices successfully. Of course you need line of sight, without buildings or a lot of trees in the way. You'd only be able to send control signals between the device over BLE, not a full cloud connection.
Well, that nixes that option! The Photon replaced an Electron since the cell signal at the site sucked. But now that we can do LTE (with a Boron), maybe we should make yet another swap, i.e. Boron for Photon.