All has been quiet here on the Eastern front for quite a while. Until late yesterday, that is. I have a Photon 2 that has begun randomly but frequently restarting on its own (48 times in 6 hours). It has now been on-line with no additional restarts for more than 4 hours but it isn't doing anything (firmware requires it to publish something every 15 minutes, but it is "silent"). It responds to pings but that is all. It is running Device OS 6.3.4.
Should I conclude that the device has reached its end of life or might the complete removal of power for a short while resolve some kind of 'brain cramp'? I am hoping the latter, of course, becasue a swap-out of the Photon requires a 12-hour round-trip drive on my part that I'd
obviously prefer to avoid. Removal of power for a while can be done by somone on site.
Related question: if the Photon is, indeed, in need of replacement, is there a way to prevent such an issue in the future, i.e. what might have caused such a problem?
If a device responds to cloud ping but does not do its normal operations that are part of loop, the device hardware is likely fine, it just requires a reset or possibly a power cycle.
There is no built-in feature to remotely restart a device, however you could try flashing the same firmware that is on it again, which sometimes can force the device to reset if it's still cloud connected.
One way a device can stop responding in this way is running out of memory due to a memory leak. This can be worked around using an out of memory handler. There are also some other possibilities in that page.
Many thanks Rick. As soon as someone wakes up near the site, we'll try the power cycle.
Well, I may spoke too soon. Although the Photon came back up after a re-flash, it was reporting bogus status on the I/O ports it monitors. So I just had someone remove power for a minute or two and now the I/O status reports appear normal.
Update: I re-flashed the firmware and that seems - at the moment, anyway - to have forced the Photon back into normal service (yay!). I'll watch for more restarts for a while but if none occur, then we'll be back in business.
Update #2: a whiel after the power cycle, the restarts resumed. I have taken the Photon off line and am preparing to replace it.
Hi there, by any chance, do you have something like this in your framework?
Haven't tried that yet Gus but right now it appears that my issue with the Photon in question is, in fact, a defect since even after a power cycle, the random restarts have resumed.
