Questions about mass deployment

[gavpret]

Hi Everyone.
Good morning!

I have 2 questions about mass deployment of the Photon:

1. Can I change the default WiFi name of the device (i.e. Photon-XXXX) to “MyProduct-XXXX”?
2. When I press the setup button to enter the listening mode, there’s a way of select which antenna
   (chip or external) will be used to connect to the WiFi router? I need to be sure that the buyers will
   be able of complete the WiFi setup even if they are at certain distance of the router.

I’m successfully using an external antenna (and switch to it in my code), but it seem that the listening
mode reverts to the chip one.

Your help will be very appreciated.
Thank you and happy weekend!

[Moors7]

@gavpret

Can I change the default WiFi name of the device (i.e. Photon-XXXX) to "MyProduct-XXXX"?

Change Photon SSID

Ok, here’s the deets on setting the SSID. The SSID is made of two parts - a prefix and the device serial. Setting the SSID Prefix The SSID prefix can be set by writing the prefix value to the device. First, create a file that contains the length of the prefix, followed by the prefix itself. In bash, this is done like this: echo -e -n "\x03Rad" > ssid_prefix The \x03 writes a literal value 3 (not the ASCII character ‘3’) to the file - 3 being the length of our prefix “Rad”. The value is speci…

@gavpret

When I press the setup button to enter the listening mode, there's a way of select which antenna(chip or external) will be used to connect to the WiFi router? I need to be sure that the buyers willbe able of complete the WiFi setup even if they are at certain distance of the router.

You could use this I guess:
https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#buttonpushed-

[ScruffR]

Just in case you didn’t read the long thread, there is a (yet undocumented) command you could use to set the prefix

System.set(SYSTEM_CONFIG_SOFTAP_PREFIX, "MyName");

But be sure to use this only very sparingly to avoid flash wear.

[gavpret]

Thank you @Moors7 and @ScruffR for your great reply.
I successfully changed the soft AP name, entered listen mode and sent credentials to
the device. Before I entered listen mode I switched to the external antenna and I can configure
the Photon over a nice distance.

One step closer to market

[btav]

@ScruffR - You mentioned to use this System.set(SYSTEM_CONFIG_SOFTAP_PREFIX, "MyName"); sparingly to avoid flash wear. Does this mean we shouldn’t be calling this every boot? Even if the prefix does not change?

[ScruffR]

AFAIK the risk of flash wear isn’t that big anymore as it seems that there now won’t be rewrites as long the content doesn’t change, but it’s still good practice to avoid doing things that are not necessary.