Use Adafruit WICED WiFi Feather with Particle Cloud?

Hi guys,

I’ve recently discovered the Adafruit WICED WiFi Feather while browsing the Adafruit website today. https://www.adafruit.com/products/3056 It is a very capable device, and uses the same architecture and WiFi chip as a Photon. I am considering buying one as it looks like a very nice board. Is it possible to have it connect to the Particle Cloud like a Photon so cloud variables and functions can be created and for it and it can be flashed OTA? Would it be possible to create a fork of the Particle Firmware to run on it to give it the functionality of a Photon?

Nathan Robinson
@nrobinson2000

I do believe that this would be possible but will be a lot of work.

The Particle team has worked hard to find and fix problems in the semi-closed source WICED library as well as in the their own open-source code. That is not impossible to work-around either but it will require some fairly deep knowledge.

Slightly off-topic, but what exactly is WICED? Is it just a pretty package of a wifi chip and a microcontroller or is there more to it?

I don’t believe this would require much working around at all - it’s exactly the same module as the P0, but on a different board - ie the wiring between the STM32 and the 43362 is identical. There are plenty of possible issues, like external STM32 GPIO mappings (no LED!) and obviously the commercial relationship (buying the module from someone other than Particle, hence it doesn’t have keys and the implied payment for the cloud service), but the WICED part should just work.

Have you tried just loading the code onto it via DFU and seeing what happens?

Oh the other hand, it’s more expensive so not sure why it’s so attractive vs the real one…

1 Like

I haven't bought one. I just thought it looked cool.

Have you tried just loading the code onto it via DFU and seeing what happens?

I tried to load 5.3rc2 to Adafruit Wiced Feather product ID 3056:

Using this link:

and these commands

dfu-util -d 2b04:d006 -a 0 -s 0x8020000 -D system-part1-0.5.3-rc.2-photon.bin
dfu-util -d 2b04:d006 -a 0 -s 0x8060000:leave -D system-part2-0.5.3-rc.2-photon.bin

Result was:

c:\>dfu-util -d 2b04:d006 -a 0 -s 0x8020000 -D system-part1-0.5.3-rc.2-photon.bin
dfu-util 0.8

Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc.
Copyright 2010-2014 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Please report bugs to dfu-util@lists.gnumonks.org

Invalid DFU suffix signature
A valid DFU suffix will be required in a future dfu-util release!!!
Opening DFU capable USB device...
ID 239a:0008
Run-time device DFU version 011a
Claiming USB DFU Interface...
Setting Alternate Setting #0 ...
Determining device status: state = dfuIDLE, status = 0
dfuIDLE, continuing
DFU mode device DFU version 011a
Device returned transfer size 1024
DfuSe interface name: "Internal Flash "
Downloading to address = 0x08020000, size = 250956
Download [=========================] 100% 250956 bytes
Download done.
File downloaded successfully

C:\>dfu-util -d 2b04:d006 -a 0 -s 0x8060000:leave -D system-part2-0.5.3-rc.2-photon.bin
dfu-util 0.8

Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc.
Copyright 2010-2014 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Please report bugs to dfu-util@lists.gnumonks.org

Invalid DFU suffix signature
A valid DFU suffix will be required in a future dfu-util release!!!
Opening DFU capable USB device...
ID 239a:0008
Run-time device DFU version 011a
Claiming USB DFU Interface...
Setting Alternate Setting #0 ...
Determining device status: state = dfuIDLE, status = 0
dfuIDLE, continuing
DFU mode device DFU version 011a
Device returned transfer size 1024
DfuSe interface name: "Internal Flash "
Downloading to address = 0x08060000, size = 189084
Download [=========================] 100% 189084 bytes
Download done.
File downloaded successfully
Error during download get_status

And it is not working. I'm stuck with the original system. I'm not an expert and it is out of my reach to understand why it is not working. Any idea?

With Adafruit system, I cannot put my chip in sleep mode. My last option is to use Cypress SDK.

R.

1 Like

What do you get when you run dfu-util -l?
It should show the Feather, and I bet it will show different information than a Photon will.

@rstaubin
Any updates on putting Photon firmware on a feather?