So I am running a photon on two aaa batteries, using a 5v step up board from sparkfun. I had it programmed and tested extensively on usb power. I then tested a bit on the aaa batteries and was happy, project was done, moving on.
I wanted to see how long it would last so left it running for several hours then came back and it was just showing the blue status led on D7 faintly and that was it. I thought no big deal, swapped the batteries for fresh ones and it will no longer boot to my code.
It seems to be stuck in the SOS mode which, from what I gather, indicates that the code on the device is borked and needs to be reprogrammed. However I cannot get it to connect to the cloud and listen, when programming before I entered safemode several times and am familar with how to do it but when I release the setup button while it is flashing magenta it just goes back to booting, I can wait for it to flash yellow and that will stick but not magenta.
I tried reflashing the firmware using the dfu utility but that didn’t make a difference. I am unsure what else I can do, I feel like maybe I need to reset the whole device but I understand that factory reset was removed from the photon.
HELP!
A video of the device a) booting to SOS, b) booting to dfu flash mode, c) trying to get it into safe mode but it ignoring me : https://goo.gl/photos/VEpeL5rqDwa9aPbN9
Did you try flashing something like Tinker or a simple blink sketch using DFU? Just want to rule out user firmware by flashing one of those. To do it, put the device in DFU mode (blinking yellow) and then run particle flash --usb tinker from the command line.
If that doesn’t work, you can try re-flashing the system parts. To do that, go to https://github.com/spark/firmware/releases/tag/v0.4.6.1 and download the two system parts with the filenames that end in -photon.bin (the files are listed at the bottom of the page in the Downloads section). Once you have those, follow the instructions on that same page for “The local DFU-UTIL method”.
Once you’ve flashed those system parts, flash Tinker over again using particle flash --usb tinker. If all goes well and you get to breathing cyan, run particle list to see a list of your devices and make sure your device shows as online and has the Tinker functions (digitalwrite, digitalread, etc) exposed.