I’m loving my Photon when it’s working, but it’s spending quite a bit of time in fast-cyan-blinky mode, without any sort of meaningful connection to the Internet. When it gets into this state, events don’t show up on the dashboard or via the API and it usually stays in fast-cyan-blinky until I hit the reset button on the top. I’m pretty sure it’s not a router misconfiguration, because no other devices in the house lose connectivity when it happens, and there are sometimes periods of hours where it stays in breathing-cyan mode and all is good.
I’m running a Linksys WRT54G router with Tomato firmware on a Comcast network, and while the network does get very slow some times it rarely goes all the way out. The Photon is about 15 feet away from the router and there’s a brick wall between them. The router reports pretty bad signal strength; the measured RSSI is -80dBm. Could that be what’s causing it to stick in the disconnected state? It seems like it should be recoverable, but sometimes it stays disconnected for 12 hours or more until I get home and reset it.
It seems to me that there is a very high likelihood that it is signal quality. I do not have a precise value for the Photon but with a core I have never gotten a value of < -80 and was able to transmit. The core’s useful range from my testing is -80 - -44
I find it interesting though that a reset fixes the problem for you.
I’ve been experiencing the same thing. Also have a Core on same wifi that has been rock solid. @Jack seems my code is not running during this state. Repowering the Photon (usb) will return things to normal but may go back to cyan blinky in minutes or hours later.
You don’t say what kind of computer you are using, but if it is Linux or Mac, try adding sudo before the command (you will need an administrators password). I think the problem you are having is that your “user” does not have permission to run the dfu-util program. The Photon needs to be in dfu mode for sure for this to work.
You can ask a Photon what release it is running (modulo a bug in the early Photons) by connecting a terminal emulator like Cool Term or PuTTY or screen over USB and typing a “v” at the prompt in listening mode (flashing blue).
I’m using Mac Terminal/latest OSX. Also tried with sudo. Same problem. My Photon will go several days without failure. I check a Spark.function() from crontab hourly. My program is also operating a relay as scheduled via Time.hour(). I was planning on installing the system at a farm hoop house this Friday, but I can’t with it being unreliable. When my Photon stops working it isn’t just the wifi. My program quits too. Pulling/inserting the power usb restarts the program. I could use a Raspberry Pi to check on it and use another relay to cycle the power but that’s obscene.
The 0.4.4-rc.3 release will bring a lot of improvements to TCP connections (your own or the cloud connection) so I would wait to deploy anything until you test with that. It should come to the cloud this week.
I am not sure why you can’t run dfu-util. Is it installed? What happens when you type dfu-util in a Terminal window? If you can run it at all, you can use the commands listed on the releases page to install the newest release candidate (rc) files and test.
Hi all, i too am having this problem, @bko firmware version 0.4.4, stays connected for several hours then drops connection (flashing cyan) and remains like that till unplugged then restarted, then works fine for a few hours then repeats.i went to demonstrate to a friend how great the photon was only to find it not connected again needless to say he wasnt impressed, wifi strength is around -55 - -63db.
maybe someone broke something between 4.3 and 4.3
saw a thread regarding similar issue with the spark core and using program mode system semi automatic, is this available on the photon?
Thanks Tezza…
Thanks @Moors7
after reading the system modes wondering if i can set up an interrupt every 30 mins or so to check if the wifi is still connected and if not do a system reset, or is this being too presumptive?
Tezza
just did it,lol got it back into flashing green, cant connect to it at the moment will fix it when i go up to bed.
it was a silly mistake on my part, just didnt notice i hadnt put the spark.connect in.
oh well…
Thanks anyway.
Tezza
