I recently bought a Particle photon so i could use it in a little DIY automation project.
Since it came yesterday, i set it up according to the guides but i am having no luck with it. I connect it thru the app and it shows fine, the IDE shows the device is flashed but there is no magenta on flash. The RGB led stays blinking green, which means nothing in the guides. Already installed particleCLI and updated, flashed binaries, still no luck. I wanted this to work with blynk app.
How can i set it up just like it came in the factory. (Still noob with particle. Srry).
Don´t know what else to do. In the video i was only trying to get the D7 LED to blink and not even that it has done.
This will give you an idea what the photon doing at anytime.
In order to be able to upload code to your photon it needs to be ‘Breathing Cyan’ on its LED. This indicates that the photon is connected to the iinternet and the cloud particle platform.
Being connected to the internet is one thing, connected to the cloud is another.
Your phton is breating green as far as I can see in your video clip, so it not connected to the clould.
First what computing platform are you using, Mac, Lunix or Window?
Second do you have any security on your wifi, such as port restrictions? Mac address filtering, firewall. It would be a good idea to mention the type of wifi router/hub you are using.
Yep, it looks like it is not connecting to the cloud. A quick test would be to turn off the wifi router for a minute, and it should start flashing green quickly. Which means it is not connecting to the network. Then when you turn the router back on, it will start to breath green again, showing its has connected to the router.
Another handy tool is to use Fing, on your table/phone. Fing a little app that will actually scan your local network and show you any devices on the network. It will let you know IP addresses and MAC addresses. If your phone/table can see it on fing. Then its unlikely to be the router, unless you have hit an IP address limit, or there is a MAC resitriction.
I think it might be worth looking at down loading the ‘Command Line Inteface’, or Particle-CLI.
Its a handy bunch of tools that are exectuted on the computers command line prompt (If you remember the days of DOS, you wil be farmiliar with it). They will allow you to update the firmware on the Photon to the current one. You photon may have an older firmware installed from the factory, and refreashing it would be a good start. However I’m not a Mac Man so I’ll leave that hand holding to someone else, but there is a good guide here:-
I dont know if it is supposed to work like this, but i found that i could only flash the code in safe mode (blinking magenta).
It now works! one ore thing. is it possible to store a log of usage ? Like, how many times a button is pressed and by which user ? (Blynk App)
By that do you mean it is breathing cyan, and you are now able to flash you code updates directly to it via the web IDE?
Looking at the question of logging a button press, you can create a counter varible in your code that incremments each time the button is pressed. However this will only count from your initial value (usually zero) each time the photon is power cycled as it get reset each time the the photon is booted.
There maybe a way of writing to non volitle ram on the Photon, and that will preserve the data between power cycles, but there are limits and technical considerations. I’ll allow someone else to share their thoughts on that approch.
Another way may be to add a SD shield to your project and use that as a ‘little hard drive’ and that might be able to preserve the data count between power cycles.
It is possible to use a python scrip running on a Raspbery PI, which can write to a text file and thus do the job of ‘logging data’. Basically the photon publishes the button count varible to the cloud, and the Raspberry PI monitors the cloud, collects the data and can write it to text file. If the raspbery PI gets power cycled it can read the last varible from the text file and continue adding to it. Thus the data is preserved. If you really want you can record data and time, and keep a very large log that way. Thats what I did for a GPS tracking project I’ve been working on. I have even been able to get the Python script on the PI to output a HTML file which pulls up the Google Maps trace of were the GPS unit had been. This has the advantage that the photon and Pi only need to be both on the internet. There actual geographic locations can be anywere on the net.
@bob2, this post could be considered as thread-jacking - please don’t.
You can take the info provided in this thread and all the other threads, by using the search tool to find a solution or open a new thread with some more background what you already tried, but don’t take over someone else’s thread to get your own problem solved.
@JavaSP, you can use the backup RAM as @VideoLiam already suggested when you look at the retained keyword in the reference docs, or you could use EEPROM, and of course more elaborate ways like SD cards or backend servers, but the first two should suffice for your needs.
And you are welcome and welcome to ask, sorry if I came across a bit bitchy, but it would be better to open your own thread with a very specific description of what exactly you experience, since even small differences between your experience and that of what seems to be the same issue could make solving your problem more difficult for us, as we may be sent down the wrong track before we get the one detail that actually tells the story.
The same goes for the other thread you posted
Just invest the extra time to write up your exact symptoms in your own thread and maybe even provide a video