Just bought a Spark Core, was it a mistake?

Getting Started
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So I just bought a Spark Core not really knowing what it was. I was enticed by the $4 price at the time. However I haven’t found any way to use it. I can’t find any instructions on Particle, and the only other instructions I’ve found don’t seem to work at the moment. The Spark Core app seems to not work for me, is that a problem with my Android device or has it been shut down? Is there a working tutorial somewhere for what I can do with this device still? Even if I can only get some basic functionality, I’d be happy with that for the $4. I just hope I didn’t waste my money…

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Hi Reuben- Where did you buy the Spark Core? We discontinued that board many years ago and do not support it. However, it is very similar to a Particle Photon and if you’re willing to tinker a bit you may be able to get it working.

What have you tried so far? I don’t have a core and can’t give you any for sure solutions, but check out setup.particle.io andthe device restore tool.

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Thanks for the reply. I did eventually manage to find a tutorial using a serial terminal interface to get it set up, and that lead to me finding the Particle CLI tools which also allowed me to set up the Core. Despite it being no longer directly supported, it does seem to work for now, and with the ability to flash code offline via Particle CLI, even if it completely loses internet access I will still be able to program and use it. I’ll need to make sure I download all the tools for local compiling just in case they get taken down from the Particle website. And I tried the setup.particle.io but it doesn’t have the Core, and I tried the Photon steps since it seemed so similar but it didn’t work at all.

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You can use neopo to locally compile and flash Particle firmware from the CLI. It is compatible with projects made using Particle Workbench. It works best on Linux and macOS, but can also work on Windows.

After installing neopo, you can enable support for the Spark Core by downloading a custom firmware release:

cd ~/.particle/toolchains/deviceOS
git clone --depth 1 -b v0.7.0 https://github.com/particle-iot/device-os 0.7.0-core

# Create a barebones .workbench/manifest.json to enable support for the Spark Core
mkdir -p 0.7.0-core/.workbench

echo '{"version": "1.0.0", "toolchains": [{"platforms": [1], "firmware": "deviceOS@source", "compilers": "gcc-arm@5.3.1", "tools": "buildtools@1.1.1", "scripts": "buildscripts@1.10.0", "debuggers": "openocd@0.11.2-adhoc6ea4372.0"}], "platforms": [{"id": 1, "name": "core", "generation": 1}]}' > 0.7.0-core/.workbench/manifest.json

Afterwards, you can make create a project configured for the core with the custom firmware release:

cd ~/Documents
neopo create my_project core 0.7.0-core
cd my_project

After writing your code in the src/ directory in the project, you can build the application with the following:

neopo build -v

You can build and flash the project over DFU with the following:

neopo flash -v

Note: This is obviously an unsupported way of building, but I am willing to answer any questions you may have about neopo.

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