Hotspot is no more! It has ceased to be!

[Dimitrios Bogiatzoules]

Remember the one of my three hotspots that arrived with the CM4 semi unplugged (https://forum.pycom.io/topic/7668/unable-to-assert-location-helium-hotspot?_=1661683707328)? It stopped working since Friday and when I went to see what is going on, I could ping it but nothing more happened. There's no reset button, so I went through the power cycle but as it seems, it's dead. The red LED doesn't light up initially and it doesn't connect to the WiFi. Three green LED but nothing works :(

Maybe the transportation defect did more harm than it seemed, so I'm contacting support for a replacement, for this very expensive piece of hardware...

[Dimitrios Bogiatzoules]

I opened a ticket for the support last Sunday (28.08.22, 13:27) but no reactions 4 working days later. I'm afraid a put my money on the wrong horse. Lesson learnt ;-)

[robert-hh]

@Dimitrios-Bogiatzoules That's indeed irritating that the company Pycom looks paralyzed. No action, rarely any feedback. That is not good.

[Dimitrios Bogiatzoules]

@robert-hh exactly my thoughts. Rolling a completely new and expensive product out but without enough support personnel to cover upcoming issues? In a market with so many competitors? I'm at risk to loose a couple hundreds of Euro but for the it could be a disaster.

[Dimitrios Bogiatzoules]

@Dimitrios-Bogiatzoules Twitter stats: 15th August - last tweet, 20th August - last answer on a tweet, 21th August - last liked tweet :(

[robert-hh]

@Dimitrios-Bogiatzoules Pycom support seemed always be recognized as leaving much room for improvement. But the actual depth of silence is something new.

[jcaron]

@robert-hh there have been a few posts from Pycom developers over the last few days. I hoped that was the sign things were finally being taken seriously, but that didn’t go very far.

[robert-hh]

@jcaron Yes. I have seen them. At least, it#s good to see that @Xykon is still present. He is at Pycom since a while and has gained a lot of experience.

[Pete Allen 0]

Hi all,

We are still here! Things have been a bit slower as it's August so people are on holiday.
Dimitrios, I've replied to your support ticket (I need to consult with a colleague)

Thank you

[robert-hh]

@Pete-Allen-0 That's good. Welcome back. Can you tell the people here something about bug fixes for Helium and PyGo?

[Pete Allen 0]

@Dimitrios-Bogiatzoules : Can you take the SD Card out and put it into a computer? If it's a windows computer you will just see the first partition, but it will at least let us know if the SD card is still functioning.
On Linux you will see the whole raspberry pi filesystem, and it will verify that neither partition has been corrupted. I'm not sure whether MacOS can see ext4 partitions.
If the SD is the issue we can get that fixed.

The other thing that could give some useful troubleshooting information is if you connect the USB-C port to a computer you should be able to see the Linux console. I can give further instructions on this if needed.

Thank you
Pete

[Dimitrios Bogiatzoules]

@Pete-Allen-0 Yes, I got that message, thank you and good to see that you are on it.

[Jason Timmins]

@Pete-Allen-0 : What are the COM port settings for PuTTY on Windows to watch the miner boot? 115,200 baud is nearly there but it's still garbled. Parity, stop bits, all that good old-school stuff. :-)

[Rui Silva]

This is an old topic, but if anyone can help, greatly appreciate it. My Pycom has become dead, ceased to be, no more, expired (monthy python reference just for laugh). The miner does not start, does not show on bluetooth, with pycom app or helium; Also does not show in wifi. Basically it is an unsuported brick.

I managed to connect Putty using serial, and I see below message:
*Thu Jan 1 00:00:05 UTC 1970
writable contains a file system with errors, check forced.
writable: Inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list found.

writable: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
(i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck exited with status code 4
The root filesystem on /dev/mmcblk0p2 requires a manual fsck*

I got the card from the miner, cloned it for backup, and ran fsck -A on the device using ubuntu, which did not find any errors.

I'm stuck, don't know what else to test or how I can correct this. If someone can help, would greatly appreciate.
Thx

[Dimitrios Bogiatzoules]

@Rui-Silva been there, done that. Just download the SD image (1) and write a new SD card with it. The hotspot should then boot as expecte. Then run the app, pair with the hotspot and run through the registration process. The network recongnises that the hotspot was already registered and you should be left with a newly running hotspot. Since summer, one of three hotspots hat to be revived like this twice (the one I pictured above). Why this happens I can't tell. The other two run with only the odd restart because the seem to loose connection to the WiFi from time to time. Again, I have no idea why this happens.

Cheers and I hope that helped.

(1) The link to the image is in the last troubleshooting entry: https://docs.pycom.io/gettingstarted/registration/lora/helium_hotspot_registration/

[Rui Silva]

@Dimitrios-Bogiatzoules Thank you ! I was getting close to no hope of reviving this! I will give it a go in a couple of hours!