Photon Breathing Green After Several Hours

I have a hundred Photons all running the same code on different (remote) networks and in my office, I have about a dozen Photons that run 24/7 for weeks without issue. Of the dozen in my office, 2 of them will breathe green after 1-4 hours of running. I moved them to a different wifi network and have the same problem. One of them I removed from my product and flashed the “Blink an LED” code to it, a couple hours later it breathes green and the LED stops blinking. Power cycling it is the only way to get it to breathe cyan again, but a couple hours later it is back to breathing green.

Any ideas where to start? I fear there may be more in my fleet doing this that have yet to be reported to me.

Could you share the system firmware versions of the devices and any other details available?

Yes, firmware version 0.7.0 for both Photons that are breathing green. 90% of my fleet runs 0.7.0.

We had some similar situations with 0.7.0. Could you try downgrading the system firmware to 0.6.3 and check. Why don’t you try flashing the device with an empty firmware so that you could confirm the device firmware is not messing up in any way.

My advice is move then all to 0.8.0-RC.11 and I bet the majority of the problems will go away. You will probably find there may be some that still are problematic - but then you will have the network diagnostics to confirm what is going on.

Do you monitor the WiFi RSSI? I have been doing this on problematic sites (fleet size is approaching 500 photons) - some locations just have problematic WiFi - i.e. the signal can drop off at points during the day, the APs might be turned off at night/out of hours or for maintenance, etc.

I will try downgrading one to 0.6.3 and upgrading one to 0.8.0-RC.11 and report back.

@armor I have 4 Photons on my desk, 2 keep breathing green while the other 2 work flawlessly. I have 6 others in the building that work fine, so I don’t think it is network related. I’ve also put them on a different networks (with a different ISP) and still the same problem. For the fleet I have WiFi.RSSI() saved to a variable every so often, but for the 2 problem devices I removed this (and everything else) and now they just blink an LED.

Breathing green is a happy place indicating a non-Cloud configuration on the Photon. If it was flashing green or flashing cyan, that would indicate attempts at connecting to the router or the Cloud. It would do this ad infinitum with possible resets after a while.

I tried 0.8.0-RC.11 recently. Any wifi error and the device never comes back online. Not very production friendly?

Sorry to hear that. My experience has been more positive. I assume you know for certain that WiFi signal drop out is not a cause of the disconnection? The not coming back online sounds more like an application problem. I completely redesigned my application’s wifi/cloud connection functions once I understood what RC.11 does.

Could you please also test woth rc.12?
This hopefully will be the last RC for Gen1&2 before the next official release to become default.

@scruffr Thanks for the heads up on RC.12 - lots of enhancements and bug fixes related to Photon and would impinge upon WiFi/Cloud connection. What would your summary be?

I only have a couple of photons but I was having this same problem that happened anywhere from 1-7 days randomly. I wrote a little program that monitored when the WiFi and cloud lost connectivity and did a serial print to a connected computer. I noted the problem seemed to happen when the cloud would connect and disconnect multiple times rapidly. In this link is what I did to fix it. Haven’t had either photon breathe green since I did this. Next thing to learn
Good luck