No change so far, but you may want to vote this one up here
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voted!
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Hi,
we had this very nice way of using softapp with the P1.
It works good for our customers.
Now with everything (seemingly) out of stock, we are updating to the (twice as expensive) Argon.
But it has no Softapp.
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Do we now need to develop 2 apps (ios and Android) … and list them in the app store to keep the product running?
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I know the ESP32 on the Argon can do Softapp … can a good developer build this feature for us? Or is it impossible?
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If that’s possible, I’d like to request to add Soft app into the Argon.
Thanks for any ideas.
Thanks
SoftAP on Argon is theoretically possible, however the ESP32 firmware installed on the device does not have server mode enabled, so you’d probably need to replace the ESP32 firmware with a custom fork in addition to the parts of user firmware to implement the protocol.
You could build a single mobile app that supports both Wi-Fi and BLE setup, that’s what the Particle mobile apps do. However, this will be complicated by the fact that there is no device setup for Argon library available, and the low-level BLE setup is not documented. The Argon was intended to be used as a developer device, not a white-label product device, so those things do not currently exist.
It’s unlikely that SoftAP would ever be implemented on the Argon by Particle as BLE is the preferred method of setting up an Argon and is what is already implemented in the Particle mobile apps.
Thanks.
Ok, what should be used as product device?
We don’t currently have a good solution, as the P1 becoming unavailable was not planned. Steps are being taken now, but there is nothing to announce yet.
@volker I don’t know at what scale you’re shipping out products, but I do this: Photon WiFi at customer site - successful provision, but never moves past flashing green - #21 by policenauts
If you’re working at scale this is obviously not realistic, but after having one too many WiFi connection failures during customer setup, I now send along one of these TP Link units with each Photon-based product I sell and pre-provision the Photon’s WiFi credentials to that TP Link unit (which obviously takes time). The customer then doesn’t even need to do any WiFi provisioning at their site, I instruct them to simply plug the TP Link into the back of their router and they’re immediately connected.
If you take the above approach, one thing you could do (which I’m now going to do, going forward) is you also modify the password of the TP Link unit to make them all consistent, so that if their TP Link access point fails, they can simply order another one, modify the settings and password themselves, and in theory the Particle WiFi product should then connect to the new one.
Hey everyone, just wanted to call attention to a potential solution for this problem that I just posted here
Hopefully it can help solve some of these issues for you and your customers.
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