Issues connecting to WiFi after resetting device

Troubleshooting
1

Background:
I’m creating a product and managing several Photons for development purposes. During PCB development, I had these devices claimed through my personal account, but as we have been transitioning our focus to customer creation and our device claim flow, I have begun transferring ownership off my personal set of devices to a product-“owned”/“claimed” devices.

I have been following the directions in the photonreset readme.

The issue:
The photon reset appears to work, but I still have a core issue – I can’t connect to WiFi after resetting the device. I have tried a few things

  1. I have tried setting the WiFi by getting a product-scoped claim code and communicating directly with the device’s SoftAP API.
  2. I have also tried using the particle setup CLI flow.

Both of these methods don’t work and lead to the same outcome. The device ends up blinking white, then blinking green for a bit, and ultimately going back to a slow blinking blue. It never blinks or breaths cyan.

Could the factory reset have ruined my device?

2

Ping @rickkas7

3

The first thing I’d try is resetting Wi-Fi credentials by holding down SETUP until the LED blinks dark blue, then continue to hold it down about 10 more seconds until it blinks dark blue rapidly. Then release SETUP.

Then try setting up Wi-Fi using:

particle serial wifi

If that doesn’t solve the problem, put the Photon in listening mode (blinking dark blue) and do a:

particle serial inspect

That will show if you have a bootloader issue, which can prevent being able to access the DCT, which can then affect the ability to use your Wi-Fi configuration.

If that doesn’t show anything unusual, a cloud debug log might be useful.

There is a small possibility your configuration is corrupted, in which case we’d have to erase the whole thing and generate new keys, but hopefully it won’t come to that.

1 Like
4

@rickkas7

Thanks for the input! I followed your suggestions and still no luck. Here is a blow-by-blow of what I did.
First, I reset the WiFi credentials, as you instruct in the quote below. I ended up seeing the same blinking green that I previously had. It is worth mentioning that the same thing is happening on multiple devices. Could this just be my computer?

Then I tried particle serial inspect and saw:

Platform: 6 - Photon
Modules
  Bootloader module #0 - version 11, main location, 16384 bytes max size
    Integrity: PASS
    Address Range: PASS
    Platform: PASS
    Dependencies: PASS
  System module #1 - version 109, main location, 262144 bytes max size
    Integrity: PASS
    Address Range: PASS
    Platform: PASS
    Dependencies: PASS
  System module #2 - version 109, main location, 262144 bytes max size
    Integrity: PASS
    Address Range: PASS
    Platform: PASS
    Dependencies: PASS
      System module #1 - version 109
  User module #1 - version 4, main location, 131072 bytes max size
    UUID: EF4BXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    Integrity: PASS
    Address Range: PASS
    Platform: PASS
    Dependencies: PASS
      System module #2 - version 108
  empty - factory location, 131072 bytes max size

Nothing seemed odd, so I tried clouddebug. I'm not getting any logs, though. Am I missing something?

 ➜  photon-clouddebug git:(master) ✗ particle flash --usb clouddebug.bin

        Flash success!
        ➜  photon-clouddebug git:(master) ✗ particle serial monitor
        Opening serial monitor for com port: "/dev/tty.usbmodem1421"
        Serial monitor opened successfully:
        Serial connection closed.
        Caught Interrupt.  Cleaning up.
        ➜  photon-clouddebug git:(master) ✗ particle serial monitor
        Opening serial monitor for com port: "/dev/tty.usbmodem1421"
        Serial monitor opened successfully:
5

So I got them working, but in a mysterious way.

My business partner tried setting them up on the devices on his computer on the same WiFi network, using the particle CLI. He initially ran into an issue with the device quickly blinking magenta, but was able to fix it by running particle update, and then running through the particle setup flow again. After that point, the device was also able to run on my computer, hooked up to USB.

When he fixed it by running a particle update, I figured I would try to run the same command on my computer. It didn’t work for me, but he was able to get it running on his computer.

So why was he able to get it running when I was not? The two possible reasons that I could think of were:

  1. Different particle-cli version
  2. Some issues that I’ve been having with my serial port connection may be having some sort of effect on the device.
  3. Something else???

We both are running particle cli version 1.29.0, so I think it is either 1 or 2. Any thoughts on why this might be happening, @rickkas7?