Has anyone got a Mesh Network going using a cellular Hotspot? With the Photon, having a cell hotspot as a backup for Wifi was my go-to standard for bad school Wifi days.
But I am having issues getting a Cell hotspot working with the Mesh devices. All seems good to connect the Argon, but when setting up the mesh network it seems to hang. In theory should it be able to be done, or is there some issue with hotspots that is a problem for the mesh?
I had a Argon setup on my Verizon phone hotspot and it worked when the Argon running fine. This was on RC 25 where the mesh was always flashing green.
Have not tried RC26.
i have used an android cellular hotspot for the past 4 months at home for various tasks none of which included any particle devices. general observation is depending on the handset and how the handset was configured i have learned a few things on how it is best to have stuff configured. probably most important is to have the handset rooted. after that find a independent kernel that will allow tweaking of cpu governor, cpu frequency, cpu keep alive, and cpu freq. locking. android handsets have a tendency to enter various sleep states if allowed to just run standard android with that std. kernel. what this means is if you are reading this forum and load a long thread it is quite possible that by the time you spend ~5 to 10 mins reading the thread your standard android handset is snoozing or asleep. this causes problems when it is time to load the next thread. additionally having the ability to lock frequencies as well as adjust the governor where you want them improves response. iphones are a huge hassle when it comes time to effectively jailbreak and find a cpu control app, i’m not even sure if one can replace the standard kernel on an iphone it’s been 5+ years since i followed them and just gave up on them. nice expensive phone no doubt but ya can’t much do diddly with them otherwise.
Can you try RC26?
With Particle Photons I used to use 2 cell phones to connect. One with the hotspot and the other to connect the Photon. With the mesh device it seemed like I could connect it with one device but I had no luck setting up the Mesh. I then tried an older tablet but could not get the scanner to work, even after taking an image and expanding it on the other phone. (I will try printing the image next).
If someone can connect a hotspot I will keep trying.
No time to keep playing with the Particle MESH at the moment. I’m going to let them work all the bugs 
out and come back to play with it in the future.
I’m currently working with the Photons + XBee 900mhz radios in Digimesh mode and its a really good and reliable combo. You can have up to 128 nodes on the same Mesh network.
So I emailed the image of the scan code to my computer then enlarged the image and that scanned on my older android tablet.
Got a cellular hotspot working by trying a few more times. I did use another Android device to get the Argon setup but no proof that was needed. I then got a Xenon working on the same mesh and did a bit of a distance test.
One cool thing with the hotspot is that I could leave a xenon with a battery pack and drive away from it with the hotspot and the Argon gateway. Inside the car I only got about 100 m, but with the Argon outside the car got similar to using my home Wifi about 220m. (Still not a perfect line of sight test, will do that later.)
I did notice something that @will should be informed of.
I have been walking around with several Xenons and they setup fairly solid local networks if they lose the connection with the gateway, but today when I shut off my hotspot to the Argon, it did not keep a local network, did not matter if it was flashing green or breathing cyan, it was basically locked up.
My Xenon was still signalling every 30 seconds, and not getting a signal from the Argon, but the Argon was not even signalling every 30 second, it looked locked. This was using the Mesh Hello World code.
When I restarted the hotspot, the Argon did not reconnect (like it was locked up). I had to soft reset the Argon for it to reconnect with the hotspot. Then everything was fine again.
Bit concerning that the Argon did not auto-reconnect with the hotspot.