Particle Setup Issues

Troubleshooting
1

I’m currently using a Photon Particle for my senior thesis project. I obtained two Photons from the department which have been used by students in the past. I followed the Getting Started tutorial on the website and was unable to connect to my colleges’ WiFi network. Followed the setup.io html file, and when I connected to the Photon-XXXX on my computer, the page stayed at the “Waiting for your computer to connect to the photon”.

I also followed this tutorial https://blog.jongallant.com/2015/08/particle-photon-firmware-flash-windows/ and still had no luck.

I cleared all wifi passwords and added my devices MAC Address to be whitelisted, and still no luck. I updated the firmware of the device to 0.7.0

Any help would be greatly appreciated and if I need to clarify anything please let me know!

2

Has the computer you are using a WiFi card?
Most desktop computers don’t, so it won’t be able to detect the Photon’s SoftAP to connect to.
I’d use particle serial wifi with the Photon in Listening Mode and avoid any automagic scanning but enter the WiFi SSID and Pwd manually.

Also double check that your WiFi does not use a captive portal - these can’t be managed on the Photon.

1 Like
3

My laptop does have a wifi card and my school’s wifi does require a username/password. I went through the particle serial wifi setup process and received the 1006 error on the monitor.

Is there a way I can assign a static IP to my photon? I was given an IP address under the Computer Science subnet and could use that if it’s possible with my photons

4

My schools wifi does have a captive portal, unfortunately. What about obtaining the devices MAC Address via an SSH Client, then asking my IT Department to whitelist it for me?

5

If your IT can prevent your device from hitting the captive portal based on MAC address, you can get the MAC from the device either in code or via USB connection in Listening Mode (e.g. sending “m” via any serial terminal app).

If you are still looking for a way to set a static IP, have a look here
https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#usestaticip-

But be aware, this is a sticky setting, so even if you flash code that doesnot set it the device will still keep the static IP. So before you give the device back, you need to actively set it back to WiFi.useDynamicIP().