[Solved] Electron Cellular Not Working now

I was humming along, had a little circuit set up, and I was putting together my solar boat that I’m going to start floating down a river soon to gps map its track…

Well, final testing, and the cellular has stopped connecting.

I get a good boot - I can load new firmware that I’ve written - but I get flashing green / flashing cyan / cyan/red combo steady and then back to flashing green.

What have I done ?

Did your code change or anything?

Has your location changed?

Has the signal strength changed?

Is the antenna connector OK?

NOTHING’s changed. Only thing that happened was the battery depleted, and the unit shut down. It hasn’t come back online since yesterday afternoon. Other interesting fact is I can’t get it into DFU mode to try to reflash it with tinker. blinks yellow, won’t take a connection.

what firmware you running?

You might try the windows 0.5.0 firmware updater app to see if that changes anything.

I’d say the color pattern indicates an issue with the cloud keys.

If you search the forum for red burst or orange burst, you will find some threads.

As a first try use particle keys doctor <yourDeviceID>

A slowly depleating battery might have also corrupted some other areas in the flash mem space, which might need to be reflashed (seen this issue on Photons withbad Vin).
Although the fuel gauge should have shut off before getting into this dangerous state (providing you used the dedicated LiPo connector and not Vin to power the device off your battery).

@BDub, any thoughts?

OK here’s some interesting input… I went through this troubleshooting:

https://particle.faqt.co/share/o7bavo

And I’m able to turn on the cellular, connect to a network, get a RSSI value, and everything EXCEPT connecting to the Particle Cloud.

Wondering if this is just lousy network and it can’t make the connection to the cloud.
Log of the serial interaction…

Running in SEMI_AUTOMATIC mode, cellular modem is OFF at boot,
not connected to the cellular network or cloud.
System RGB LED will typically stay White, until connecting to cloud.
Connect a serial to USB adapter on the TX pin to see debugging output.
Suggested workflow: o, d, r, p, P, p, C, s, s, z

Press a key to run a command:
[o] turn the cellular modem ON
[d|D] cellular data connection (Particle SIM|3rd Party SIM)
[n] scan the cellular network for operators
[r] get the RSSI and QUAL values
[P|p] send ping to www.bing.com|Google DNS 8.8.8.8
[C|c] to connect|disconnect the cloud
[s] publish a “b” event name and “count++” data
[i] read the SIM ICCID
[z] turn off the cellular modem, and go to deep sleep
[K|k] enable|disable Serial1 debugging loopback
[h] show this help menu

Turning on the modem: OK!
Connecting to the cellular network: OK!
Getting signal strength: RSSI: -87dBm, QUAL: 43dB, BARS: 2
Pinging Google DNS 8.8.8.8 (Consumes 240 bytes per ping): OK!
4 bytes from google-public-dns-a.google.com IP:8.8.8.8 TTL:52 RTT:305 ms
Connecting to the cloud: ERROR!
Timed out after 30 seconds!

I think I need to get a hold of particle somehow. I seem to have a problem in the cloud… I took it to a place I got -55 RSSI, and I could ping google @ 18ms … perfect data connection. NO connection to the Cloud.

I’ve got same issue, It was working great and now just flashing green, with the weird red orange blips sometimes…

THIS URL: [solved] How to upgrade and setup my Beta Electron?

FIXED MY PROBLEM.

I unclaimed the device, deactivated the SIM, then re-did the setup. After activating the SIM, I went through that URL above, and after flashing the UDP key, it came back online.

woohoo!

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For future users who visit this content and read the comments I would like to note that I experienced the same problem today. It however was not related to issues posted above.

I had installed an Electron based device and it worked perfectly well for about 20 some odd days. Later, for some reason, the device went offline and stopped working. I noticed that the Green LED on the Electron was flashing so I immediately thought it was not able to connect to the cellular network. So I messed with the antenna, swapped the module into a different board, defaulted back to the Tinker Firmware, and nothing worked. I could not for the life of me figure out what was wrong. During trouble shooting I opened the Particle Console site and went to the billing page for one reason or another only to find that the devices had been shut off due to exceeding their monthly data limit. I had no idea this happened and the module was not able to tell me through the LED. Be sure to check the billing page at https://console.particle.io/billing to make sure your device has not been paused due to data limits! Highly recommend an LED mode to indicate this.

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