Iotawatt.local trouble

New install (my 6th or 7th to date).

I have dull green light after WiFi setup, but iotawatt.local page will not load on my computer browsers, nor on my iPhone. Not sure where to start with troubleshooting from here…I’m in the same room as the IotaWatt and the house WiFi signal seems strong on both my computer and phone.

Hi John,

Could be a lot of things, so a few suggestions:

Be sure the IoTaWatt and phone/computer are on the same network. Sometimes a home network has a guest account and that won’t work.

If you can get at the router’s DHCP client list, try to get the IoTaWatt IP address and use that as in HTTP://192.168.1.36 for instance.

It’s possible the WiFi router or a firewall is inhibiting the UDP broadcast or response needed for the zeroconf (.local) protocol, making the IP the only way in.

All of my devices (computer, phone, IotaWatt) are connected through my client’s “Guest” network. Are you saying this won’t work?

It should work if they are all on the same network, but can’t be sure. It’s possible that a guest network, which is a public type network, doesn’t support the UDP broadcast that allows your computer to find the IoTaWatt. I don’t know this, and it would be equipment specific, but it’s a possibility.

Did you change the default name of the IoTaWatt in the device configuration? If so, that is the name you must use with .local.

No. This is a new unit install, and I haven’t been able to get iotawatt.local to respond…so I haven’t had access to the device configuration.

I’ll check in with the client to see if we can use their regular WiFi network instead of the guest network.

It’s a little tricky to make that switchover. As long as the guest network is available, you won’t get the AP to configure another. You will need to either switch off the guest network or move the IoTaWatt out of range and configure to a dummy SSID, move it back in range of the primary network and you should get the AP.

Clunky, but there isn’t a graceful way to do it.

Yes many of the better Guest networks will isolate devices from each other on the guest network.

You may also find they have a gues 2.4ghz and 5GHz network which could give similar issues - lastly if it is a mesh system like google - your phone will attach to the higher speed guest network 5Ghz - and the IOTAwatt will only attach to the 2.4Ghz network.

Get them to check their DHCP server to see if the IOTAwatt has been assigned an IP Address.

Craig