I’ve had this issue on and off for a while, but now it seems persistent. I re-installed the latest Particle desktop IDE to make sure, but the error persists.
If I compile for Photon with a target of 0.7.0 for firmware, the IDE results in “Compiler timed out or encountered an error”. Clicking on this says there were no compile errors. However, when I change the target to 0.8.x it compiles fine and flashes.
The same happens whether I have a device selected, nor not selected and only compiling. It could be the mere fact of changing the target that somehow resets it. Any suggestions?
Try compiling with CLI.
particle compile photon . --target 0.7.0 -v
This should give you a more verbose output.
One possible cause:
Changing the target versions also impacts the free memory your project has to play with. 0.7.0 was a bit more memory hungry than 0.6.3 and 0.8.x had that streamlined a bit again.
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I would strongly recommend always compiling at the command line as ScruffR advises. The IDE is nice for syntactic highlighting but compilation is problematic.
Thank you @ScruffR and @LabSpokane!
I switched to the CLI and compiled first without adding verbose and received a few errors I never received in the Desktop IDE, including a particle variable over 12 characters. I fixed those then reran with verbose on and compiled fine for the targeted version.
Unlike the web IDE, the output doesn’t provide a neat % FLASH and RAM. Data + bss makes up RAM? So I’m good on that with 20480 total. Flash = text + data? So should have plenty of room with 110K of flash?
I'd not trust the percentage give by Web IDE since the base values of available flash & RAM don't reflect the real values.
This is a valid project for a Photon which uses 164% of RAM 
The base values are still refering to the Spark Core.
Your >12 character variable name was the issue, after correction Desktop IDE should also be able to build.
That's why I don't use Desktop IDE. Web IDE and CLI just give you better feedback.
