Doing a workshop here just now and one of the participants have now “killed” 3 Photon’s in a row. They start up after getting wifi credentials, but after the fast cyan blinks, it does not breathe cyan. Instead it blinks red 3 times and restarts.
According to the docs, this is “Flash red three times: Connection failure, Cloud is unreachable”. The problem is, if I give it credentials for something that “just works” (like my phone hotspot) it still does the same? Also the Device Doctor in Particle CLI shows the above error message and refuses to complete.
Suggestions?
Does this also apply after you cleared the previously stored WiFi credentials by holding SETUP for 10+ seconds till rapid blue blinking indicates clearing in progress?
Wouldn’t you know - yet again @ScruffR teaches me a new trick 
No - I never knew that I could hold down setup for 10 seconds to clear credentials. Brilliant!
What happened here is that the Photon incorrectly identified a network as having WPA2 security, but no password set. I suspect that this is a bug? I don’t even think that´s technically possible to have WPA2 and no password?
The odd thing is that the guy in the workshop that set this up used the latest Particle Android app. He set up 3 brand new devices and they all went into the Red Blink 3 times mode. After this, I managed to get them working again by supplying new credentials via command line with a json config file and then running the Device Doctor, but this would have been a complete showstopper for anyone new to the Particle platform.
I never experienced this despite setting up maybe 300 Particle devices before, but one thing I noticed is that all these Photon’s now have a new naming scheme with more than 4 letters? Is that relevant?
J
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IIRC WPA2 requires a minimum PW length of 8 characters and CLI also enforces that, but does not prevent you from using "special" characters which might not be received well.
If CLI actually does allow an empty PW, then filing a issue for the firmware and CLI independently, since CLI and the firmware should prevent that from happening.
It shouldn't be, but I have heard that some older versions of the Particle mobile app weren't able to find/add/claim Photons with 6 letters suffixes.
Can we mark this thead as solved then?
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