Possible bad Omega2 and Mini Dock
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I received 2 Omega2s and a mini dock and an expansion dock. So I plugged one of the Omega2s into each dock and powered them up and followed the setup instructions.
The Omega2 in the expansion dock booted and I got it configured (with a few mis-steps along the way). I was not able to register it on the cloud as that piece of software just repeatedly asked me to login.
The Omega2 in the mini dock seemed to be in a repeated boot cycle - the LED flashed fasts, then slowly, then went solid, then repeated. I was not able to access the serial or network connections.
I swapped the Omegas2s between docks and the one in the Mini dock behaved the same way.
The Omega2 in the Expansion dock seemed to boot ok and I started the configuration process. After multiple trials, this Omega2 is unstable. It is difficult to get a serial connection via Putty, but it does work sometimes. 'wifisetup' runs, but most often 'ifconfig' does not show apcli0 at all and when it doe, the inet data is missing (inet6 is present). A few times the apcli0 has been ok.
I've tried most everything in the documentation, but the mini dock never works and the one Omega2 almost never works.
If anyone has an idea of where to go from here, I'd appreciate some direction.
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@Dan-Barnett Use the first Serial Port to help debug.
https://community.onion.io/topic/1329/tip-switch-the-omega-to-verbose
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I carefully inspected both Omega2s and both docks. The only thing out of the ordinary is the mini dock cp2102 has a black 'residue' between pins 27 and 28 (DTR and DSR) and also between pins 22 and 23 (NC and CTS). I cannot determine if the pins are shorted together or not. Also, I have no tools fine enough to clean out the gap between the pins.
As for enabling verbose mode in the Omega2 serial output, I haven't found anyway to do that. Also, since I can't connect to the serial line for the malfunctioning Omega2, I can't even see a terse output. Out of several dozen efforts to connect to that Omega2, I have had only 3 or four successes. This morning, after inspecting for solder defects, I put the Omega2 in the Expansion dock and let it boot. The LEDs flashed like a normal boot, but I can't connect to the serial port and the wifi is not up. I'm using Putty on a Window 7 computer to explore there computers.
Any ideas? Thanks for your support.
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I forgot to mention that the Omega2 Wireless AP does come up and I can connect to it with a Raspberry Pi 3. The Raspberry Pi browser only shows a color gradient screen when connected to the AP.
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Some progress. I connected my desktop wifi to the Omega2 AP and then used the desktop Chrome browser to get into the console and that worked. Apparently the Raspberry Pi browser doesn't like the console page. Then I was able to use Putty to ssh to the Omega2.
So it looks like I can use the Omega2 as long as I don't try to connect via the serial port. I have verified that the desktop computer recognizes the serial port (COM35), but when trying to connect via Putty, I get an immediate error "Unable to open connection to COM35 Unable to open serial port".
This still looks like a bad Omega2 and a bad mini dock to me.
Is there anything else I can try? Thanks.
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As of Jan 25, Onion is going to ship me a replacement mini dock.
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I received the replacement mini dock yesterday ( March 9) and now I'll try to put it to use.