Particle Photon like product using STM32F207's ethernet instead of Wi-fi

The Archive Product Creation
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Greetings Particle community,

We want to create a Photon like product using STM32F207 MCU with its built in Ethernet instead of Wi-fi to get connected to Particle cloud. We are using STM32F207ZG Nucleo Development kit as Proof Of Concept.
We would really appreciate if you could give us the directions on how to achieve this. If we can replace the WLAN wiced stack with Ethernet and use the Spark cloud connectivity functions, would it be possible to connect to the cloud and perform OTA and as such photon’s functionality ?

Cheers,
Maddy

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@Maddy5075, the entire Particle firmware is open source. The firmware has included a HAL for some time now so you will need to adapt the F207 code below that. As for replacing the WiFi stack, that will be your largest challenge. You may want to look at what Bluz did to give you an idea of the complexity.

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Thank you @peekay123 for the valuable reply. Bluz however use BLE. We were able to modify the bootloader of the particle photon firmware and dfu a blink LED app and it worked although it had dependency on Wiced stack which has DCT related functions like dct read/write. We are including that library at the moment to generate the executable and to avoid unresolved link errors. We plan on to exclude the library later and have a file with functions dct read/write.

Our next step is to modify system part 1 which is wi-fi related and replace it with STM32F207’s Ethernet. We believe we ought to make some modifications as per “Core firmware” since photon inlcudes WICED resources. Could we initialise the Ethernet in HAL core functions so that the board connects to Router which acquires IP from DHCP and use spark cloud wiring functions.

Like you mentioned its the biggest challenge and need thorough analysis of the software architecture/design and code but its doable isn’t it ? Appreciate your feedback.

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I would be very interested in this also.
I’m working on some projects for lighting control but some of the fixtures are in locations where getting WiFi would prove difficult.
Using a Pi would work but the cost is too high, the Photon’s price is very attractive.
I might look into this more once the semester is done.