How to retain control of an Electron using Cellular.on and Cellular.off

[ScruffR]

Have you seen this thread?

Electron sample code for fault tolerance and problem debugging

Most of the time the Electron just works, happily connecting and disconnecting from the cellular network and all is good. Except once in a while, some devices have a hard time getting reconnected. Disconnecting the battery and power usually solves the problem, but that can be a pain for remote devices. This experiment is some code that might help recover from this situation automatically, and also log some data to better figure out what’s actually happening, so if it’s a bug, it can just be fix…

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@rvnash

. If you look at the code, the line that says "Ceoff" should say "Cellular off". Somehow it looks like memory was corrupted, or calling Cellular.off while the Serial output buffer was still being sent screwed that up.

It looks like a TX buffer overrun, which should not happen due to the default behaviour of Serial.print() should be to block if there is no free space left
https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/electron/#blockonoverrun-

Unless some buggy code messes up the head/tail pointers.

Just for completeness, your int now = millis() should actually be unsigned.

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As a side note:
Since the actual TX doesn't happen with the Serial.print() statement but async to your code Cellular.off() (and its effects) might be the source of the TX corruption, which might be something to investigate (@BDub ?)