The board shutdown on its’ own and now blink green indefinitely. It is connected by USB and the provided battery (3 cells) from Particle.io.
I have not done anything with the board in term of programming. I tried to use I2C and UART protocols, but couldn’t get it to work. Hopefully there will be more documentation/guides for the board. In short, I haven’t done anything to the board but have it connected and sat on my desk for the passed two plus weeks.
Could someone advise on this behavior? If this indicates the hardware is faulty somehow, I would like Particle.io support directly.
Disregard previous post about it being fixed. It went back to the solid red LED again. It looks like it went to sleep. I pushed the reset button once, the green LED blinked for a while (seems to be booting), but then went back to solid red (offline). I haven’t initiated any sleep mode. I pushed the reset button again, now it’s blinking green indefinitely.
Solid red means the device is powered off. Does the state change if you press the button?
By default, if you installed the desktop build it will go to sleep on inactivity, and will go into solid red. The headless build defaults to not going into sleep mode.
Yes the state changes to blinking green from one quick button press. It would take a couple of tries to get a successful boot. On the successful try it would take more than ten minutes to be online. On the unsuccessful try, it would take less than thirty seconds to go back to solid red state. The setup is headless build.
The board has entered sleep mode once again. It’s a headless setup since initial install. I have not re-installed, modified the firmware or reconfigure any settings. I’m going to leave it in sleep mode for now to observe.
Is there a channel (support contact) where I can get Particle.io direct support for hardware troubleshoot?
I narrowed it down. It takes two tries to wake up the board. The first try would blink green for about five minutes then go back to sleep. The second try would blink green for ~29 minutes then glowing cyan. The board should not be in sleep mode since it’s a headless setup.
I’ve had this happen to me as well, no idea. I just pressed the button a second time after shutting down and it finally booted. I’m trying to remember if that only happened with the battery connected tho…will experiment with that without the battery connected.
I think the issue is that the battery is not charging. Since the USB was connected, I couldn’t tell that it was depleted. I don’t have a way to charge this type of battery. I have a regular 2-pin JST charger but not 3-pin. At the moment, the board is only connected by battery and it’s not on. Pushing the power/reset button does nothing (no light). The battery is depleted.
Could someone advise whether this is a hardware or software issue?
Would Particle.io customer service please contact me directly to help troubleshoot or replacement? It seems like this is a faulty board.
I think sometimes the Tachyon fails to charge the single cell battery because the voltage drops a little too much. I ended up fixing the issue by using a separate battery charger. Also, since I had 3-pin JST female connectors lying around, I made a 2-pin JST to 3-pin JST cable but without the thermistor wire, and used a 2-pin JST charger. Once the single cell battery got to at least 3V3, the Tachyon was back online and charging the battery again.
If you don’t have a 3-pin JST or a spare 2-pin JST connector but do have a 2-pin JST connected to a LiPO, as a temp measure, you can take off the 2-pin JST connector from the existing LiPo. It’s pretty easy to pull out the wires, just carefully lift the end bits on the 2-pin JST with a small flat screw driver and pull out the wires.
Once done, pull out the GND/VCC wires from the 3-pin JST and then insert them into a 2-pin JST male connector. Just be careful to get the polarities correct. Once you’ve charged up the battery fully, put back the 3-pin JST connector onto the single cell battery. A little tedious process if you don’t have 2-pin/3-pin male/female connectors handing around.
With the single cell battery fully charged, the Tachyon should then boot up with the battery and charging should work fine. Just don’t let the battery deplete too much.
Hopefully, the battery issues will get fixed soon.
Thank you for the advise. I will try this, sounds fun. I'm not sure why the battery got depleted, because it was always connected to the board and USB. Maybe the battery wasn't fully charged when I first connected it. It was a brand new 3-cells battery from Particle.io. And it was the first time being used, right after package delivered.
So if the board cannot charge the battery, would it be considered as faulty? Or is it the way it suppose to behave? Or is it a software or hardware issue?
I charged up the single battery cell using this Adafruit 1A charger. It can use USB, DC or Solar power with a 5-10V input voltage range. It’s a pretty good charger, especially. for a solar panel.
I have the Adafruit Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer battery charger based on the MCP73833. I think I'll retrofit the charger instead. I might have difficulty reconnecting the battery wires to the 3-pin. I'll jump a wire with 3-pin jst receiver from the charger.