Photon keeps breathing magenta and loads nothing but the Tinker [SOLVED]

Troubleshooting
21

Hi all, I’m having a similar issue with two photons out of 7. Breathing magenta, but no luck getting any app to flash. The web IDE tells me the flash was successful, but I never see it blinking to indicate a download, just the lonely magenta breath. When I power it up, I get the following on the dashboard.

{“data”:“auto-update”,“ttl”:“60”,“published_at”:“2015-09-13T02:16:17.671Z”,“coreid”:“36003xxx114734xxxxxx3037”,“name”:“spark/status”}

I have done the particle update a few times now, and even did the npm install again. I always use sudo on my mac to make it easier to handle the WiFi swaps.

Hope someone can help. I hate to think I’ve lost 2. I can provide the full id, but didn’t want to publish it here if I end up getting it working again.

22

@peteb,

do the following:

  • npm update -g particle-cli
  • place the Photon in DFU mode
  • particle update

Let me know how this goes :wink:

1 Like
23

Same thing for my first device, breathing magenta. The particle-cli update and the device update both seem to have worked as expected. The particle update caused the LED to alter its flash behavior and took about 20 seconds. Once done, it reset and went back to breathing magenta.

The second device is in a worse state. I get a single white breath, the red SOS, and then a single HARD FAULT flash. Not sure if this device is recoverable now or not, but I hope so.

Thanks for the help.

24

With the hard-fault, please put the device in safe mode manually then attempt the firmware update. If the SOS continues, we can look deeper into that to find the cause. Thanks :smile:

25

I can’t get it to stay in safe mode. It starts to blink magenta, but as soon as I release the setup button, it goes back to the SOS.

26

Thanks for that. It sounds like there is some memory corruption.

Could you put the device in DFU mode and run this command:

dfu-util -d 2b04:d006 -a 0 -s 0x8000000:0x100000 -U SOS.bin

and send me the resulting SOS.bin file?

This will help us diagnose the issue and find a fix.

Many thanks!
mat.

27

Same problem of magenta blink-
So, after putting the device in DFU mode, I did a “particle update” with the CLI.
But that didn’t work for my photon device. I got following error

28

You’ll need to install DFU utilities. Please follow the link given and that should help you resolve this.

I’m summising this message wasn’t clear to you? If so,please let us know how we could improve this message to make it clearer! Thanks :slight_smile: cc: @nexxy

29

I went into this problem also with lot of users sharing a project. And we all wasted lot of time to understand why our Spark/photon was not working anymore after flashing our project from particle-dev

As I recommendation to avoid bad experience, I would suggest to put information note on github particle dev page telling users that’s there is a new firmware and they MUST use one time web ide or particle-cli to flash a dummy app (blink as example) to get the firmware update. And until firmware is not updated, using particle-dev may expose to problem and not working devices.
I tough I was alone and it was an isolated problem, be every users on my forum had the problem.
just my 2 cents

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