Yesterday I installed a new photon. Everything worked fine, firmware updated to 0.5.2 and it was running my code. Then I noticed that it sometimes blinked cyan for some seconds followed by the normal cyan breathing.
I checked the dashboard and noticed that it loses cloud connection every ten minutes (11:18, 11:28, 11:38…). I switched the photon off and on at 11:42 but it showed the same behavior and continued the same “rhythm” (11:48, 11:58…). So it’s not 10 minutes after startup but at a pretty constant time grid.
I flashed, “Tinker” from the Particle app with exactly the same behavior. Two other photons running on the same network have no issues at all. It’s not flashing red or green during these events, just from breathing cyan to blinking cyan (around 2-30 seconds) back to breathing cyan.
I hope someone has an idea what could be the problem here.
@BDub This is my only photon that shows this behaviour…
CLI is at version 1.15.0 but I have the photon soldered on a PCB already and I don’t have a USB cable that fits. Is there a way to check the stuff OTA (I’m not so familiar with the CLI).
I alway publish the firmware (System.version()) to the dashboard during startup and it shows 0.5.2.
Yes, I flashed Tinker with the iOS app and was able to switch LED 7 on/off.
Anything on your PCB that fires every 10 minutes?
No. It has IR sensors, DS18B20 temperature sensors, LDRs, a pressure sensor breakout board and 2 MAX7219CNG chips to drive 114 LEDs. This is the sixth identical board that I soldered and this is the only one which acts like this so I'm really puzzled.
Are you publishing events close to 1 per second?
It's not publishing except the version information during startup.
If I PM you the photon ID, is there anything that you can see on the server side?
@Maarten_CH, am thinking it might be a good idea to perform this experiment - downgrade the firmware version from 0.5.2 to say 0.4.9 and see if the issue is resolved.
Sure I'll take a look at the logs to see if anything looks suspicious on the server side.
You can downgrade by flashing in this order OTA tinker -> system2-049 -> system1-049
You can watch the event stream after each flash to know when the flash has succeeded and the photon is back online.
I thought about this as well @mdma and that wouldn't necessarily explain disconnects every 10 minutes if true. However @Maarten_CH also observed the 10 minute disconnects with a Photon running Tinker I believe.
It looks like your Photon is encountering errors in the TCP connection every 591 seconds, sometimes 1141/1191 seconds. I’m wondering if you have the ability to run a quick test. If you can turn your phone into a mobile hotspot, erase credentials completely on the Photon (hold Setup for > 10 seconds), then get it connected to your hotspot. See if it stays connected longer than 20 minutes. You could also try to force a different IP address on your Photon or Router, it’s possible something is trying to use that same IP address in your network, causing errors every 10 minutes.
@BDub It looks like it didn't drop the connection from the phone hotspot during the last 60 minutes.
You could also try to force a different IP address on your Photon or Router, it's possible something is trying to use that same IP address in your network, causing errors every 10 minutes.
I will try this tomorrow evening after work.
I'm very happy with the progress but still puzzled why this happened to this photon. I didn't see any issues with the other two photons on the same network and the several others that I installed during the last couple of months.
Based on the MAC address of the devices, the Router will issue a lease for the device for a particular duration. It will reconnect to the router over and over dynamically with DHCP, but will be given the same IP address that was issued to it previously, until the lease expires. Then it will grab a new one based on the devices attached, and which sub address is currently the next one available. It might even keep grabbing the same one. So it's conceivable that something is funky with that IP address (multiple devices attempting to use the same one, usually because one is given a static IP after the first one has acquired an IP dynamically). Or I suppose it's possible that the Photon is on the edge of your WAP's range and frequently yielding errors... this seems less likely though considering the 10 minute error interval.
You might want to try logging into your router and checking out what IP addresses are in use, and if there are any rules set for particular IPs or MAC addresses that would coincide with your Photon. You could also check out the RSSI (or dB levels) reported by all of your Photons while you're in there.
The IP it got was 192.168.192.60. Now I've set it manually to 192.168.192.18 and it disconnected only once during the last eight hours so it seems that there is indeed something strange with the specific IP address.
The photons report dB levels in the range -65 to -75 which is 10 to 15 dB lower than the router reports for the same connections. However, I think signal strength is still ok.
So it seems like the problem is solved by manually assigning a different IP address. I'll update this thread in case the problem comes back.
is getting hazzy now. Hopefully you can figure it out because I'd sure like to know what it was.