I’ve had to deploy a Particle Photon combined with a 3G router in an extremely rural area, as the Electron didn’t have quite the grunt needed to pick up such a weak signal.
It’s working fine, but the data usage is fairly high. I was wondering whether anyone else has had similar experiences and whether there is anything that needs to be configured at the photon-end to optimise it, regarding being a little less ‘chatty’.
The extent of my knowledge is that the Photon uses a TCP connection, which may use a little more data, is this correct?
Thanks all.
The Photon is not optimized for data usage, so it will use a lot more data than an Electron. Among other things, the Photon pings the cloud every 10 seconds, and every reconnection requires full cloud handshake.
The Electron has a lot of data-saving measures (23 minute ping, resume session) that aren’t enabled on the Photon.
It’s theoretically possible to turn on UDP mode with the data-saving measures on the Photon but this requires the local gcc-arm tool chain and building custom monolithic binaries. You can’t use the cloud compilers, OTA flashing, etc. after making the switch, which is unsupported and may or may not actually work.
Using a much bigger antenna with the Electron might be another option.
That’s an option - thanks @rickkas7