Solid red light, wrong wifi password, need to reset

Support
1

I have a new IotaWatt, received it two days ago and I am trying to set it up on wifi before I go and connect it to the wires in the breaker panel.

I was able to get the initial iotawatt#### AP and attempted to connect it to my non-broadcasting wifi network. I realized after saving the parameters that I had accidentally capitalized the passphrase. The iotawatt now comes up for a moment green then goes solid red when plugged in and it is not available on my wifi network under iotawatt.local.

Is there a way to force it back into AP mode?

2

Do you have the AC reference connected?

3

Have you resolved this?

4

No AC ref and no CT clamps connected, just the 5v DC power supply while it sits on my computer desk. I wanted to make sure it got connected to my WiFi first so when I take it to my garage, if it doesn’t connect, I know it is a range issue and not a configuration issue. If the current issue happened in the garage, I wouldn’t know if it was unable to reach the WiFi network.

No, not resolved. I posted this issue then went to bed so I haven’t even had a chance to see if it will go back to AP mode after being left without power all day.

EDIT: I just plugged it back in again, same thing, green light for a moment then solid red.

5

What’s that they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

The installation steps are here. First step:

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The AC reference is needed fo proper operation.

6

So the fact that it did work in AP mode the first time I connected it was a malfunction, got it.

Thanks for the insult by the way.

7

Actually no. It didn’t go into AP mode after the first time because it did connect and reconnected on subsequent restarts. The message log should show that. It didn’t do anything else because there was no AC reference to synchronize regular sampling activity. It was apparent that there was no AC reference but giving you the benefit of the doubt that you at least read the first page of the installation docs, I thought I’d be subtle and ask if the AC was connected.

Sorry about that.

BTW/ the latest release now in ALPHA auto-update will operate without the AC reference. It times out the sampling and gives the housekeeping tasks a chance to run. It’s been a long road to get this into the field but seems to be on track to be the general release in a month or two…

8

Someone may correct me (please do), that you found a, what I am going to term, write-hole. In that you were able to connect to the IotaWatt in AP mode while at the same time provide Internet access to it such that the internal real time clock got initialized. So on subsequent reboots it couldn’t connect to your WiFi (password typo), but the RTC was good enough that it got to its next boot strap step…looking for/at a reference voltage and not finding one.

9

Attaching the Vref allows me to connect to it.
The log is interesting, shows a couple of reboots with no wifi connection, then a couple with connection, then a couple more without connection, then back to connected again.

Not sure how that happened, but I have it stable connected now with the right password, and have been able to connect to the setup page.

I initially tried to get it ‘online’ without the Vref because I was not planning to connect any CT clamps to anything on my desk. I had no reason to expect the reference was needed to run the device in addition to the DC power source, but now I know.

I won’t be trying to connect it inside the breaker panel until this weekend as it is in the single and low double digits temp (degF) here for the next few nights.