Windows 10 driver for Photon Redboard (dev-13321)

Development Boards Other Microcontrollers
1

The getting started guide for my DEV-13321 Photon Redboard says I should be able to power it on by plugging a USB cable from my Windows 10 (1903) computer to the micro-USB connector on the board. The red power light blinks several times but does not stay on. And Windows then warns me of an unknown USB device. I tried asking Windows to search for a driver with no luck. The Sparkfun Getting Started guide has a link to a Photon driver install web page but the link is broken. So far I have not found any mention of this board on the Sparkfun forums. I’m probably not searching for the right text.

I was hoping to wirelessly upload sketches from the Arduino IDE to the board in what will eventually be a location with no easy direct physical access. I don’t mind using the Photon Web IDE as long as it supports the FastLed library and I can use code developed in the Arduino IDE. I’ve tried using ESP8266 based boards like a WeMos D1 and your ESP-8266 Thing but I eventually screw things up and loose the WI-Fi upload capability and have to resort to the USB connector.

Is the Photon Redboard a good robust choice? What am I doing wrong? Did I mess up the bootloader?

Thank you

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Hi Reddy.

This sounds like a either a bad USB cable or there may be a bad USB connector on the board. Have you tried a different USB cable? The power LED is directly connected to USB power so it should never blink and should always light no matter if you have drivers or not.

Also, the Photon is not compatible with the Arduino IDE but particle has their own off line IDE that allows uploads over USB. They call it the Particle CLI and it comes with Windows drivers too. The link below will get you the CLI installer and drivers.

https://binaries.particle.io/cli/instal … ISetup.exe