I recently found myself on the brink of bricking my Photon due to an error related to “claiming” the device. I eventually found the underlying culprit – and I believe it is a bug in the Particle infrastructure – and wanted to share it with anyone else who may be searching for help when they end up in this situation!
- I have had a photon working great, associated with my account
- I wanted a friend to flash his firmware on it – so I removed it from my account and he tried to claim it
- ERROR…
- I gave up and tried to add the Photon back to my own account
- ERROR…
- I started searching this forum, copy-and-pasted some things I shouldn’t have copy and pasted. Put my healthy Photon in a very bad state; I couldn’t connect to it at all, I couldn’t get it back on wifi, and I had this red LED flashing at me to remind me of the mistake I just made.
- I tried resetting cloud keys, fiddling with the CLI, reflashing the firmware manually, … all to no avail …
- Then I remembered I had added this photon to a “product” under my account on particle.io; While I removed the photon from my account, it did not remove that product record.
- I removed the product entry and
my Photon was able to be claimed by Particle account again
Happy hacking 