Particle.keepAlive vs Particle.publish

Troubleshooting
1

I’m having trouble keeping my devices online and reachable with a 3rd party SIM.

I’m currently using a 60sec Particle.publish which posts the battery voltage and the uptime.

I assumed perhaps incorrectly that this would be enough to keep the UDP session active, and therefore I wouldn’t need to use the Particle.keepAlive - the thinking was that I might as well post something useful rather than just have a keep alive.

Even with a 60sec publish the device still has device connected events appear every so often, so it’s definitely still going offline.

As a side note, when the device reboots, it occasionally does not register it’s particle functions with the particle cloud. so while I can see the events arriving it is basically unreachable.

My question is. - is it acceptable to use the Particle.publish rather than a Particle.keepAlive? It’s really frustrating when it doesn’t stay online.

Also I have a MQTT session running on the same device and this is rock solid. (it does drop out every now and then and it immediately reconnects without issue.

Thanks

Marshall

2

Even 60 seconds might be too long for some 3rd party SIMs. Could you try shorter intervals to see if that makes a difference?

3

I’ll try it in the morning. as an additional thought, does it actually need to send a packet to the Particle cloud?

I could just send a 1 byte UDP packet to nowhere and that would “trick” the cellular provider to keep the session running? this would save a lot of data if I have to do sub 1 minute posting.

4

A Particle.publish() would do the trick, but a mere UDP sent byte won’t help, since you’d need to target a cloud endpoint to achieve the hole punching.