A colleague and I are going to be running a workshop on IoT in March, with maybe 30 faculty, using my platform of choice, the Photon. I’m a little wobbly when it comes to the initial set up of devices, and want this to go as smoothly as possible. Can I somehow set up all the devices ahead of time, e.g., add them to my account, and maybe just magically transfer control to participants, so that it’ll show up in their list of devices, and we spend more of our time on content?
You can’t ‘magically’ transfer control, but you can pre-configure the wifi credentials. That way, they’ll only have to claim them, which can be done in various ways. One of the simplest would be if you gave them the device ID for that device, which they could then add to their account in the Web IDE.
Depending on what you want to do during the course, you may or may not want to have them set up the CLI. If so, then configuring/claiming their device is a great first exercise.
Thanks, Moors7, setting up wi-fi in advance sounds like a good idea.
Setting up via the CLI would be beneficial, except I’m worried about people showing up without the software installed, plus I don’t want to get bogged down in the minutiae of configuration – the agenda is already packed.
When I configure wi-fi, don’t I have to claim the device as I’m doing that (sorry, I don’t remember, it’s been 4 months since I’ve done that)? And if so, can they just claim it from me?
No need to claim you can use the CLI, the app or a serial terminal to set those credentials. If it's unclaimed, any method to claim it will work. If you do claim them, you can only 'overrule' that by using the app. If not, then you'll have to unclaim them from your account first.
If you use particle setup claiming would be an implicit part of that, but with
particle serial wifi
you can just set the WiFi credentials without ever claiming the device and no need to unclaim it.
If you also know the WLAN_CIPHER you can even set the creds without the network being present.
you can use the CLI, the app or a serial terminal to set those credentials. If it's unclaimed, any method to claim it will work. If you do claim them, you can only 'overrule' that by using the app. If not, then you'll have to unclaim them from your account first.