SparkFun Forums

[Sheepdog]

Four hours to "get in" to a new Photon.

Some of the gory details below.

Finally in, not entirely sure how or why at this stage... but a few pointers to things that were problems for me...

If after a failed setup, and a power cycle for your Photon, it is winking green, that's it trying... and failing... to connect to your Wifi.

I couldn't get it to connect to my WiFi via WEP

Happily, my router allowed me to set up a guest network. On that, I used WPA with a pre-shared key. It consists of 10 digits. I entered them into the Photon setup "service" as "themselves", in ASCII. I didn't need to convert to hex.

Even after "success" in setup, the thing wouldn't work. Said it was offline. Switched app in Android off, then on again. Suddenly, wretched thing was working. Tinker came up... buried in "Particle", by the way... and worked. Sadly the usual elation wasn't there, given that four hours to turn an LED on and off isn't much of a trade off. And I hate to think what I've done to my Windows XP machine and the things that were, previously, working there. to get this far.

Disappointed. I should have listened to those little voices that urged me never to start with this thing. Just too many ways to not work. Sorry guys. I hope others will find the energy to enjoy this thing, 'cause it IS a tremendous achievement to have made it at all, and it seems that a lot of work has gone into getting it this far.

But set aside a lot of time and patience, if you want to have a go yourself. There's a lot to it, and any one tiny thing will stop you being happy until you can find and fix it... and all the OTHER tiny things.

====

First tried an Android.

Seemed to go right, but then fell over right at end, with...

"Setup process could not disconnect from the Photon Wi-Fi network. This is an internal problem... please try running setup again after resetting your Photon and putting it back in blinking blue listen mode if necessary."

Then tried with Windows XP, direct connection, manual entry of Wifi data. Got to near end, and then entered a loop of...

"Obtaining device information" in command line "particle setup" execution.

Pretty boring "home" network, with Motorola SBG6580 at the heart of it. Not new to many of the issues involved.

Very discouraged. Can't get even as far as the "Tinker" example, or "Blink".

Sometimes at end of attempts to set up over Android, the LED between the buttons of the Photon was flashing green... but then when I power cycled everything, even though Photon still flashing green, Andriod wanted to do the setup routine.

[marmotxing]

I picked one of these up for my brother, thinking it would be a good entry level MCU he could learn with (and even on) his iPad. We had a bit of difficulty determining how to get it to connect to a WEP network, as the documentation seemed to indicate this was not a problem. Turns out you need to folIow some additional steps to connect to a WEP secured network. From the troubleshooting forum (linked below):

To setup WEP on the photon requires you add some extra information to the WEP password, specifically:

the index of the WEP key (0-3) (in your router it's probably labelled 1-4, so just subtract 1)
the length of the key, typically 5 or 13 bytes
the key itself
For example, let's say we have the key 123456789A at index 0, then this would be written as

0005123456789A
Breaking that down:

00 - this is the key index 0. Other possible values are 01, 02, 03.

05 - this is the length of the 40-bit key [added:you may see 64-bit security selected in your router settings, or try this first if you're "guessing", which uses a 40-bit key] (5 bytes - it's the number of letters/numbers in the key divided by 2). Another possible value is 0D for 104-bit keys.

123456789A - the remainder is the actual key

As I understand it, you can just "guess" the password to enter when setting up the Photon should be "0005" + [the actual password/key for the network]. Give that a shot (or try "0105" " [password/key]if it doesn't work), and if it doesn't work you'll have to access your WiFi router through your browser to get the information. I logged into the router he was using to confirm, but this worked perfectly to get his Photon connected. If you need help search the internet for your router and it should be pretty easy to get the router's address if you're having trouble.

I received the following response from Particle support:

Unfortunately, at the moment, our devices are not fully supporting WEP encrypted networks due to the lack of true "security" flaws in WEP networks. If you still want to attempt to connect to the WEP network then you can follow the thread from our community below. Also the community may be your best resource in furthering the effort behind WEP solutions.

Link: https://community.particle.io/t/problem ... on/13282/8

Best Regards,
Corey @ Particle

After following the directions above, I was able to get the Photon to connect to the Particle Cloud all on my Android device (and he's able to see it and use Particle on his iPad).
Hope this helps!