Potential damage to SparkCore with soldering iron near u.fl connector

Troubleshooting
1

I mistakenly applied a soldering iron to my SparkCore, thinking that I needed to ‘desolder’ the L1 chip so that I could use a u.fl antenna. This was before I realized that procedure was for an earlier model. My iron wasn’t altogether too hot, but I had it applied for a number of seconds, doing this several times, using a soldering removing tool to try to desolder the L1 that wasn’t there… I’m wondering if this is sufficient to cause damage to the SparkCore antenna or u.fl connector components?

Now, I’ve been having trouble getting it to flash through the IDE properly, although it does go through connections stages and breathes cyan on my local network. I also can’t seem to access any Sparkvariables through CLI, each request times out.

So, time to replace the SparkCore, or could it be another issue altogether?

2

Judging by your description the mere heat of the soldering iron should not have damaged anything, but are you sure you haven’t desoldered any components (even partly) or could it be that you inadvertently bridged some pads/pins?

3

Could you try performing a factory reset, and then check whether or not your Tinker functionalities are working? You could use the app for that, or something like this. Let us know.

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4

Okay, I checked it out on another router network and it seemed to work fine. I ended up buying another Sparkcore anyway, just because they’re great. thanks for the help!

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