Trying to get up to speed after brewing hiatus

SD cards have a limited lifespan (expressed in # of writes). I’d recommend a fresh start.

Ok. So if something goes completely off the rails could I just put my current SD card back in, put the Core back in, power it back up and it would be back to how it is now?

Yes, that would work. The core/photon and the SD card are the only places with persistent storage.

Great, thanks for the info.

I have installed the Photon and I am going through the setup of Brewblox now. Everything has been going smoothly until I got to Step 6. I plugged in the Spark and get a white screen. I trying flashing the firmware but it says no compatible usb devices found. I tried to reboot the pi and also tried a different usb cable, neither made a difference? I also tried to flash the bootloader with no success. Any suggestions?

White screen is typically a symptom of a missing bootloader.

What was the output from the bootloader command?
If you run lsusb, what is the output?

A misschien bootloader should not cause problems with DFU mode.
Try putting the photon in DFU mode manually by holding the setup button during reset until it flashes yellow. Then run the firmware flash and if successful a bootloader flash afterwards.

But don’t limit your tries to a single USB cable. I have seen many cases where the third cable worked.

Here are the things Bob asked for. I will try what Elco suggests now. I will see if I can find a third cable. But seems odd as this cable was just working this morning with the old setup.

pi@raspberrypi:~/brewblox $ brewblox-ctl flash
Please press ENTER when your Spark is connected over USB
INFO Pulling flasher image…
edge: Pulling from brewblox/firmware-flasher
Digest: sha256:55b233a4e8d3346a811ea57fb63a8b4988f96155a6e3ee23b8166bf3872142f1
Status: Image is up to date for brewblox/firmware-flasher:edge
docker.io/brewblox/firmware-flasher:edge
INFO Stopping services…
Removing network brewblox_default
WARNING: Network brewblox_default not found.
INFO Flashing Spark…
Triggering dfu on port /dev/ttyACM0
No compatible USB devices found
pi@raspberrypi:~/brewblox $ brewblox-ctl particle -c flash-bootloader
Please press ENTER when your Spark is connected over USB
INFO Pulling flasher image…
edge: Pulling from brewblox/firmware-flasher
Digest: sha256:55b233a4e8d3346a811ea57fb63a8b4988f96155a6e3ee23b8166bf3872142f1
Status: Image is up to date for brewblox/firmware-flasher:edge
docker.io/brewblox/firmware-flasher:edge
INFO Stopping services…
Removing network brewblox_default
WARNING: Network brewblox_default not found.
INFO Starting Particle image…
INFO Type ‘exit’ and press enter to exit the shell
IN control transfer failed: LIBUSB_TRANSFER_TIMED_OUT
Command ‘docker run -it --rm --privileged -v /dev:/dev brewblox/firmware-flasher:edge flash-bootloader’ returned non-zero exit status 1.
pi@raspberrypi:~/brewblox $ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 2b04:c006
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp. SMSC9512/9514 Fast Ethernet Adapter
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9514 Standard Microsystems Corp. SMC9514 Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

I tried doing what Elco suggested and got this.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cd ~/brewblox
pi@raspberrypi:~/brewblox $ brewblox-ctl flash
Please press ENTER when your Spark is connected over USB
INFO Pulling flasher image…
edge: Pulling from brewblox/firmware-flasher
Digest: sha256:55b233a4e8d3346a811ea57fb63a8b4988f96155a6e3ee23b8166bf3872142f1
Status: Image is up to date for brewblox/firmware-flasher:edge
docker.io/brewblox/firmware-flasher:edge
INFO Stopping services…
Removing network brewblox_default
WARNING: Network brewblox_default not found.
INFO Flashing Spark…
Triggering dfu on port /dev/ttyACM0
[Error: Error: No such file or directory, cannot open /dev/ttyACM0]
Flashing Photon…
Flashing System 1 file…

Flash success!
Flashing System 2 file…

Flash success!
Flashing Firmware file…
Error writing firmware: dfu-util: Invalid DFU suffix signature
dfu-util: A valid DFU suffix will be required in a future dfu-util release!!!

dfu-util: Error during download get_status

Command ‘docker run -it --rm --privileged -v /dev:/dev brewblox/firmware-flasher :edge flash’ returned non-zero exit status 1.
pi@raspberrypi:~/brewblox $

I just tried to flash the bootloader and that seemed to work. It said flash success. The Brewblox logo popped up and it now has the 6 empty black squares.

Should I try to start the system of is something still wrong with the firmware?

If you see the 6 squares, your firmware is ok. You can continue with the normal install guide.

Looks like everything is up and running. I am messing with the UI now. This will take some getting used to. Much more complicated it seems.

Thanks for all the help!

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