Hello,
I bought my Oak in the original kick starter campaign. I bought 3, but so far I'm very disappointed. I had a lot of issues trying to get the device to connect to wifi. Lots of forum searches and it looks like this is a common problem that is still not fixed (why not?).
For anyone looking, what worked for me was to download FireFox 44 (
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/44.0b9/), and then open a locally saved copy of the setup page (
https://rawgit.com/digistump/OakSoftAP/master/config.html). Initially the firmware failed but finally made it on the second try. Then I manually retrieved the device ID (
http://192.168.0.1/device-id while connected to its wifi) to add it to the Particle Cloud and that seemed to work. I could ping it from the Particle IDE and that worked fine- it showed it was connected.
I was pretty happy, until I tried flashing a program to it. Nothing. It would restart and the status in the Particle console showing events was "No user rom found", which I came to find out meant it did not flash the program. Not that it wasn't obvious because I flashed a simple LED blink program & tried registering a variable in the Particle cloud and that did not work. I spend a lot of time but nothing. It was stuck with the 3-quick flash blink.
Meanwhile trying to flash my second Oak, the second Oak's wifi SSID name seems to have some odd unicode symbol at the end, and won't show on my list of devices to connect to on my computer. It did show on my iPhone, and it does show on my list of networks if I run "netsh wlan show networks" from the command line- but I can't connect to it from the command line either. I have no clue why this is the case on the second but not the first Oak.
I feel very frustrated and disappointing that I spent the last 4 hours getting nowhere. The most frustrating part of all this is it seems like this is not uncommon, but there are no/few efforts to resolve this, and activity in the forums seems weak.
I'm starting to realize maybe I bought the hardware version of vaporware.
I guess this is mostly a rant, although I'd love any direction on how to move forward next. Currently, it seems the only Oak I was able to get connected to the cloud is no longer even doing that (I tried changing the firmware from the Particle IDE and that seems like it was a bad idea). I'm thinking maybe I can purchase this guy and see if I can follow some of the instructions to update the firmware:
https://www.amazon.com/WINGONEER-converter-CH340G-Serial-Adapter/dp/B01DC0D9U2/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1543190407&sr=8-8&keywords=USB+to+TTL+CH340G However from what I've read it looks like there's issues with the Particle cloud. If this is the case, will I not be able to flash programs to the device over wifi? If not, this dramatically lowers the advantage of the Oak to me. Right now I'm feeling like I threw away money and the authors have gone MIA to their next project.
