I have to disagree with that last paragraph. Arduino is notorious for not explaining things correctly, and the users are left to waste hours of their time troubleshooting and sharing intel on how to keep these things working like they should in the first place. None of what is happening with the updates should occur mysteriously.
This security update fiasco is the last straw for me. I ended up with one of my Nano 33 IoT devices getting bricked, and the other is trapped in a loop of firmware updates that never take hold (both using IDE and the cloud). Not to mention the fact that I already gave up entirely on REV4 because they cannot do the one thing that they should be good at out of the box: maintain a connection to the internet. My projects have been dead in the water since February and I’m out of patience. I’m not wasting any more of my time or money on Arduino cloud.
It is a fair criticism, but I don't see how it is relevant to the paragraph you are responding to.
I'm sorry that you weren't satisfied with the Arduino Cloud service.
Even if you aren't interested in using Arduino Cloud any more, the Nano 33 IoT and UNO R4 WiFi (I assume that is what you mean by "REV4") boards are useful for all sorts of other projects independent from Arduino Cloud. Giving up on Arduino Cloud doesn't need to mean also giving up on embedded systems and the Arduino framework in general. So if you would like assistance with using your boards for other projects, I'm sure the forum could help you with that.
Typically a board is only "soft bricked", where it is fairly simple to recover the board if you know the procedure.
If you want help with that, please provide a detailed description of what you mean by "bricked" , including:
What did you do?
What were the results you expected from doing that thing?
What were the results you observed that did not match your expectations?
Make sure to include the full and exact text of any error or warning messages you might have encountered.
We might be able to help with the firmware update.
If you want help with that, please provide a detailed description of what you mean by "bricked" , including:
What did you do?
What were the results you expected from doing that thing?
What were the results you observed that did not match your expectations?
Make sure to include the full and exact text of any error or warning messages you might have encountered.
It could be that the network problem you encountered was specific to Arduino Cloud. If so, you might find that the board will still work very well for other projects.
Didn’t intend direct criticism of anything you said. Just used it as a springboard to vent my final frustrations. I appreciate your offer of help, but I’ve already spent the last two years limping my projects along because of the mind-boggling unreliability of the cloud connections. I work for a science-based organization, built instruments for it since 2023, and set up some very useful displays of the data (because the cloud’s dashboard options are great). But depending on those cloud connections led to my humiliation, more than once.
I announced project completion only to soon be faced with inexplicable data losses and downtime, bricked boards, etc., leading to me spending hours scouring the forums for tips on how to rig something to make it work correctly (like so many other people). None of them over the last 2 years have ever worked correctly for very long. Getting my boards to work after this security change is just chasing ghosts. My outlook is, if I buy a legit Arduino product (which I have, about $350 USD worth), I should be able to start a straightforward project, connect it to the legit Arduino cloud service, and have it work far more often than it doesn’t. I’ve experienced nothing but the exact opposite of that, and I won’t do it anymore.
I will still use the working boards for offline projects because they always do what they’re supposed to do as long as WiFi has nothing to do with it.