Hi there,
I added several Electron devices recently, but the “Owner” of those devices is “none”. But the first device in the following picture has the right owner. Why? Does it make any difference? Thanks.
If the owner field is empty, then the device has not been claimed. Once you’ve added the device ID to your product it will appear in the device list, but the owner field will be empty until claimed.
For Wi-Fi devices, claiming will typically occur when the user first claims the device from the mobile app.
For cellular devices, it’s more common to claim all devices to a single company account instead of individual customers, though you can use simple auth or two-legged shadow customers if desired.
While unclaimed devices in a product sort of work, we don’t recommend that as a normal operating mode. You should either have customers claim the devices or claim them to a single account, not leave them permanently unclaimed while in normal operation.
From the CLI, you’d typically claim the device using:
particle device add YOUR_DEVICE_ID
You can only claim a device when it’s online and breathing cyan.
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@rickkas7 What do you mean by
"unclaimed devices in a product sort of work"
I have done this as a temporary measure to stop a web app receiving 2 events because it was subscribed to both the user account stream and the product stream. I have not seen any not working issues nor any change when the device is claimed again.
There are two problems with unclaimed product devices:
One is that another user can just particle device add it to their account if they know the device ID and it’s online and unclaimed. Though what they can do with it will be limited since it’s a product device and they won’t be able to change the firmware on it.
The other is that there is no way to send a private event to an unclaimed device.
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Why do you mean “private event”?
Is there a private event to reset Electron devices remotely?
Thanks.
Each event can either be public (currently the default) or private (recommended). Anyone can subscribe to a public event, or send a public event, making them unsuitable for private communication.
When sending an event to a device and the device is unclaimed, it can only subscribe to public events. This means that anyone can see the event, and anyone can send that event, which may not be suitable for security reasons. This only matters if you’re sending events to the device, of course.
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Rick, thanks for the clarification. A private event in this case would be where the device had subscribed to a specific event stream but again if the device is using a product bearer access key and the publisher too then isn’t that private between them?
The situation is when a device subscribes to an event using MY_DEVICES, which limits the events it receives to the prefix and from the account owning the device. And the account owning the devices is different than the owner of the product.
Even though a product can post an event to the product event stream using a product bearer token, it won’t always work as expected.
The device in this case won’t receive it because the event will be considered to be owned by the owner of the product, not the owner of the device, and the device won’t receive it.
The case where all of the devices are owned by the product owner is just a case where it happens to work because the two owners are the same. This is common for Electron products.
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