Some question before getting started

Getting Started
1

Hi all,

I registered some time ago because I bought a core unit on ebay but I never had the time to make it work. I tried last week and I think it is broken or corrupt in some way and thats why I bought it so cheap back then. Sorry if some parts are not correctly writen, my english is not as good as it should.

I bought a photon which I think I will receive tomorrow and I have been reading some documentation pages these days.

Well, I have a couple of questions. First one, related to the capacity of photon board itself. Now I have some arduinos connected through xbees to a local network (raspberry with an xbee as main node) which has 6 digital inputs for sensors, 6 digital outputs and a pwm or another digital output and a couple of buttons. Its a kind of automated home environment. I guess there is no problem with the amount of pins and their use, is it?.

Second question. I just read about I have to pay to use the dashboard a monthly fee. Is it correct? I have some plans to sell my product but at a very low price (just covering costs, nothing else). Also, the amount of units I am planing to sell I don’t think never reach 30-40 units. For sure, they will never take 100. I would be proud if I am able to sell 10 between my friends and family. I am not planning to become rich with this, I already have a job and this is just a hobby.

I would want to switch from arduino yo photon because I want to be able to update the firmware in case I find a bug and also because now I need a raspberry and a screen to connect the raspberry to the internet through a local wifi network and being able to send frames received by its xbee to my personal server. I don’t even need to save the data in particle servers. I already have my own with all the scripts already running. So I could use particle platform to update firmware and trigger some functions some time (Switch on/off a light…).

What is the situation with this? I mean, do I have to pay because I have a kind of product due to the amount of units? Or I can have all the units registered to my account, manage them from it and it is ok?

If you have read till here, thank you.

2

Shouldn't be, but what parts of your current setup (RasPi or XBee or all) do you intend to replace with the Photon?

You won't need to pay anything to run a Photon.
The dashboard (now console) is free for makers like yourself.
Simplified: Only if you are setting up an organization that will create a product and want to use the fleet management features, you might want to use the paid tiers for convenience (free up to 25 devices per fleet product) - but it's not compulsory, even for 1000+ units.

BTW, what's wrong with your Core?

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I am planning to remove my current arduino&xbee and use a spark photon. Because of that, I won’t need any more the raspberry. Now, I use the raspberry to read data from xbee network and send through an api rest to my server.

So, even if I have 30 devices, I can update their code without problems. Thats perfect.

I don’t know what is wrong with it. I tried a hard reset (yellow blink…) But I can’t connect to it. When I power on, I just see a white light blinking and after performing an add core operation with my mobile phone, it finds nothing. I guess the wifi module is not working but I haven’t tested so far.

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Yellow blinking is DFU mode. Try holding it longer until it starts blinking white, that should do a factory reset. After that it should start blinking blue, at which point you can try the app.

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