Device

The ticker proves a new network works before it saves anything. When you tap Connect on the Change Wi-Fi page, it first looks for the network in a scan, “Looking for that network nearby...”, to learn its signal and security; a network the scan misses, a hidden one for instance, is tried anyway (“Not in my scan - trying anyway (hidden?)”). Then it leaves your current network and dials the new one with the details held in memory only. Each attempt gets up to nine seconds and there are up to three, shown as “Connect attempt” / “1 of 3...”; between them the glass gives the last attempt's reason and “Retrying...”. Once it is on, it checks that it can reach the internet through the new network (“Wi-Fi OK - checking the internet...”). Only then does it write the new network to its storage, read the saved copy back to make sure it took, and keep the address settings that came with it. With the Lock on, the page asks you to unlock first.

A failed change leaves the ticker on the network it had. It notes that network before the first try and never overwrites it while it tests. If all three attempts fail, the glass says “Couldn't join. Back on your saved Wi-Fi.”, the old address settings go back, and the ticker rejoins, allowing up to 12 seconds. It then holds a card headed “Couldn't switch” for 15 seconds, with the network it tried, the reason in its own words, and “Your Wi-Fi settings were not changed.” The coins come back without a restart. A round that never gets on takes at most about a minute from Connect to being back on the old network: three nine-second attempts, two 3.5-second pauses, 12 seconds to rejoin, plus the scan.

Two outcomes count as failures even though the router let the ticker on: a network that gives no internet on any of the three tries (“Joined, but no internet yet.”), and one where something answers in place of the ticker's server, as a sign-in page does. The second stops the tries at once, because trying again cannot get past it.

The ticker pauses its coins and shows “Change Wi-Fi to”, the new network's name and “from” the old one, above the current step and a green bar. The page shows “Trying” and the name, then repeats each step the ticker shows for as long as it can still reach the ticker. When the ticker leaves your network to try the new one, the page loses contact and keeps checking quietly.

On success the glass shows “Connected!”, the new name, “My new address:” with the address, and “Open my settings page there.” for 20 seconds; then the ticker restarts once and comes up on the new network. If your phone can still reach it, the page shows that address as a link and warns that the ticker restarts once to finish up. If it cannot, after a run of unanswered checks the page says “I've stopped answering here, which usually means I've moved to” the new network, and sends you to the glass, which always shows the outcome: the new address, or what went wrong.

The settings page is served by the ticker itself, at its address on whichever network it is on, so after a switch your phone or computer has to be on the new network to reach it. The page says so before you start: “After switching, the phone or computer you're using must also join the new network, otherwise you won't be able to reach me here.” Unless you gave it a fixed address, the new router hands the ticker its address; read it off the glass, where “My settings are here:” also shows it during every start.

The Change Wi-Fi page gets its list from a fresh scan, and the ticker shows the result on its glass as well. It shows “Scanning Wi-Fi” and “Looking for 2.4GHz networks nearby...”, then pages through what it found, a lock beside secured names and bars for signal, up to 14 networks with a note such as “+ 3 more in setup page” for the rest, and ends on “Resuming coin display...”. Your phone gets the full list once the glass is done, with the ticker's current network marked “on it now”. If the ticker is busy drawing a screen at that moment, the page says it could not get a list and asks you to tap “Rescan”.

The ticker holds one network at a time. A proven change replaces the old one, so it will not fall back to it later if the new network goes away. The address settings travel with the network: picking a different network on the page empties the “Static IP (advanced, most won't need)” boxes, so the ticker takes its address from the new router unless you fill them in again.

Pick the network the ticker is on now. There is nothing to type; the page says “You're on this one now” and applies only the Static IP boxes. The ticker shows “Updating my address...” and tests the new address before keeping it. If it works, you get the “Connected!” card and one restart; if it reaches nothing, the glass says “Couldn't apply that address”, the previous address goes back, and the page says “That address didn't reach anything.” Emptying the boxes returns it to an address from the router, tested the same way. See fixed address. To keep the same address for good, a reservation on your router is the better way; see the address settings.

“Save it anyway” stores a network the ticker cannot reach from where it is, for a ticker you are about to move. It appears only after a failed try and takes two taps; the second, “Yes, save it and leave”, comes with the warning that the ticker leaves your current network at once. The glass then says “Saved. I'll join it when it's in range”. If the name or password turns out to be wrong, the ticker has never once connected with them, so it does not wait for that network forever: after a couple of failed rounds at start-up it opens its setup network by itself, keeping every setting. See save a network for another place.

A new password for the network the ticker is on is set at the router, not on this page, because it does not exist until you set it. You can warn the ticker first: pick the network it is on, tap “I'm about to change this password”, then “Continue”. For the next 30 minutes, losing the Wi-Fi makes the ticker restart after two minutes instead of the usual hour. After that restart the router refuses the old password, and after four refusals in a row the ticker opens its setup network by itself, keeping every coin and setting; you type the new password there. Without the warning the same happens after up to an hour, or right away if you unplug the ticker and plug it back in. The warning holds an intention, not a password, and a power cut clears it. See changing your router's password.

The setup network is a small Wi-Fi network the ticker makes itself, so a phone can hand it your home Wi-Fi details. Its name is “CT” and three digits taken from the ticker's chip, so it never changes, and the ticker later uses the same name on your router. It is open, so there is nothing to type to join it. It runs on channel 1, takes up to four devices at once, and the ticker sits on it at 192.168.4.1. Your phone may warn that this network has no internet; that is expected. The network goes on the air as the welcome card appears and shuts down when the ticker restarts onto your Wi-Fi.

The setup page opens by itself on most phones because the ticker answers the check a device makes when it joins a network. The phone asks a known address whether the internet is there; the ticker answers every name with its own address and replies with its setup page, so the phone pops the page up or posts a sign-in notice to tap. Some phones, and often Windows laptops, leave it to you: open a browser and go to http://192.168.4.1, with http:// rather than https://, because the ticker serves plain web pages only.

The glass follows along. The instant a device joins, it shows “You're on my Wi-Fi!” with the address. If no browser has shown the page after 90 seconds, that card alternates with “Scan to open my page”, a QR code that opens the page in the phone's own browser. Once a browser really shows the page, the glass moves on to “Doing great!”.

• 2.4 GHz: its radio cannot see 5 GHz. A router with one name for both bands works; on a split router, pick the 2.4 GHz name.
• Open, WEP, WPA or WPA2 security; not WPA3 only, and no username.
• No sign-in page: hotel, cafe and store networks that want you to tap “I agree” cannot work, because the ticker has no browser.
• Your main network: a guest one usually gives it prices but walls your phone off from its settings page.
• A name of up to 32 bytes (an accent or emoji counts as several) and a password of up to 64 characters, typed exactly. A name its fonts cannot draw still joins but looks wrong on the glass.
• An address from your router, or a fixed one under “Static IP (advanced, most won't need)”.

The ticker builds the list when the setup page asks for it, not before, because a scan takes its one radio off the setup network for a few seconds. After four cards to tap through, the page shows “Choose your Wi-Fi”: each name once, strongest first, a lock on secured networks, five bars and the signal in dBm, green at -67 dBm or better, amber down to -79, red below. A “guest” badge marks names containing that word, “my saved Wi-Fi” a saved network that has worked, and other tickers' setup networks are left out. Each scan adds to the list, up to 32 networks, so one a sweep missed stays; “Rescan” starts afresh. A network that hides its name never appears: tap “Hidden SSID? Enter it manually” and type the exact name. The ticker tries a name its scan cannot see anyway, since a hidden network answers only when asked by name.

The page checks what you typed, hands it over, and holds the button for up to a minute (“Working on it… 60s”), because every extra press would make the ticker start over. It refuses a password under five characters for a secured network and asks once about one under eight, or one with a space at either end; a second tap sends it as typed. The box under “Wi-Fi password (case matters)” shows what you type unless you close the eye, and the eye decides the same for the glass, which shows “Got it - thanks!”, the network, the password and “Logging in...” so you can catch a typo.

The ticker looks for the network in a scan, then tries to join: up to three tries of up to ten seconds each, with “No luck yet.” and the last reason between them. It stops early when another try cannot change the answer: a password the router proves wrong, a network it cannot find, a full router, or a weak signal. If a refused password starts or ends with a space, it tries once more without the spaces, as long as eight characters remain, and keeps that version if it works.

Once on, it shows “Checking if I can get to the internet...”, a “Status report:” table for eight seconds (the network, the signal, its new address and how each connection check went), and “You're all set!” with “My IP Address” for eight more. Then it restarts onto your Wi-Fi, opening with “Looking good!” / “Starting up...”.

The phone leads with a verdict built from what the ticker observed, then says what to try:

• “The router rejected this password outright”: the router proved it wrong.
• “I've tried this password 3 times now and never got in.”: refused without that proof; it suggests a typo, then distance, then a router that holds new devices for approval.
• “I can't find that network right now.”: check it is on, in range and on 2.4 GHz.
• “Your router says it can't accept any more devices right now.”
• The router let the ticker on but never sent it an address.
• “I can barely hear your router from here”, or “I lost sight of your router partway through connecting.”
• “I can see your network, but nothing came back when I asked to join.”
• A network that wants “a business style sign in with a username”.
• “Something stopped me joining your home Wi-Fi, and I can't tell exactly why.”

Your entries stay in the form: fix what the message points at and tap Connect again. The glass loops the failure cards, 11 seconds each: “What happened” with what the ticker recorded, “Let's try again.”, “Tech tip” (only after a refusal), “Also worth trying” (only when the signal measured weaker than -67 dBm) and “Don't give up!” with 192.168.4.1 for anyone who closed the page. From the second failure, “Don't give up!” also leads for 12 seconds. More: password refused.

The ticker finishes setup anyway: it saves the network, shows the “Status report:” with each check's result in color, and a plain line under the table when its server did not answer, then “You're all set!”, restarts, and keeps trying from your network by itself. The phone normally gets the same success message as any setup, so the table on the glass is where to read what did not answer. If its last line says “A sign-in page blocks me.”, the network wants a web sign-in the ticker cannot do; use your home Wi-Fi or a phone hotspot. See joined, but my server is quiet.

A new ticker, or one whose Wi-Fi was erased, waits in setup with no time limit: with no working network saved there is nothing to go back and retry. Failure cards loop for as long as your phone stays on the setup network; once they have played twice, leaving it brings the join cards back.

Phones often hop back to their usual Wi-Fi from a network with no internet. The page rides out the ticker's quiet spells while it scans and joins, asking several times before it says “I've lost touch with your setup device (phone/tablet/PC).” and explains how to rejoin. A ticker that opened setup because its saved network refused it restarts after 15 quiet minutes to try that network again, after a five-second countdown that any use of the page stops.

What the ticker does depends on how far setup got. Before you tap Connect nothing is saved, and setup starts again from the welcome card. After a Connect that failed, it keeps what you typed, but those details have never worked: a new or factory-reset ticker goes straight back to setup at power-up without trying them, and one whose Wi-Fi was erased tries them for about a minute, then reopens setup with its settings kept. If the router had already accepted the password, the ticker joins that network at power-up as if setup had finished. While no network is saved, power cuts do not count toward the quick-restart factory reset.

The setup page finds it for you. It keeps the new address, shows it under “My new address, remember it:”, keeps checking it and, when the ticker answers on your Wi-Fi, opens the settings page in the same tab. If nothing answers for a couple of minutes, it suggests your phone is still on the vanished setup network and asks you to rejoin your usual Wi-Fi. The glass shows the address during every start, under “My settings are here:”, and your Show my IP address settings decide when it appears later.

A new or factory-reset ticker also introduces itself once: a couple of coins, then “Nicely done!”, “Open a browser.” with the address, “Scan for my settings” with a QR code, and “For help...”. The moment it sees the settings page open, it says “You're in settings!” instead.

The ticker counts power-ons that follow each other quickly, and the fifth in a row triggers a full factory reset. Every time it is switched on with a saved Wi-Fi network, it adds one to a counter kept in memory that survives the power being cut. Once it has been running for five seconds, it sets that counter back to zero. So the count can only climb while every power-on is cut short inside those five seconds, and when it reaches five the ticker erases itself.

Each power cut has to come within the first five seconds that the ticker is switched on. Only powered time counts: the ticker can stay unplugged as long as you like between restarts, so there is no need to rush plugging it back in. From the second power-on, a red line grows under “for factory reset” from left to right, timed to finish as the window closes. Cut the power while it is still growing. If the line completes, the count starts again from nothing, and the next power-on counts as the first again.

The window is kept short so that a flickering outlet or a bumped cable is unlikely to string five power-ons together by accident, and long enough to see the circles appear and then unplug calmly.

The countdown shows how many quick power-ons the ticker has counted and how many are left. From the second one, the start screen adds a row of five circles under the logo, red for each power-on counted and gray for the rest, with a red message underneath: “3 more”, “quick reboots”, “for factory reset”, then “2 more”, then “1 more” and “quick reboot”. The first power-on looks like any ordinary start, because every ordinary start counts as one. On the fifth, all five circles are red, “Factory Reset” appears in red for a second and a half, and the erase begins.

Only a real power-on counts: unplugging the USB cable and plugging it back in, or anything else that cuts the power. Restart on the settings page doesn't count, and neither do the restarts the ticker makes by itself, to reconnect or to recover from a fault. That is deliberate. A ticker that keeps restarting on its own can never count its way to a factory reset and lose the Wi-Fi it depends on.

The ticker has no buttons and no touch screen, so its power cable is the only thing you can work by hand. The gesture is the way back when the settings page can't help: the network it knew has been renamed or replaced, the Lock password is forgotten, or the page won't load at all. Some of the ticker's waiting screens suggest it, for example “Changed your Wi-Fi? 5 quick restarts wipe me.” while it waits for a network that doesn't come back.

The five restarts work whether or not the ticker can reach your Wi-Fi, because it counts each power-on before it even tries to connect. That is what makes the gesture useful while the ticker waits for a network that is down or gone, or after it has opened its own setup network because its saved network turned it away. The one exception is a ticker with no saved network at all.

The five restarts do nothing in three cases:

• The ticker has no saved Wi-Fi network, as on a brand-new ticker or after Erase Wi-Fi. It then sets the count back to zero at every start, since it is already in first-time setup.
• A power-on lasted five seconds or more. The count starts over, and the next power-on shows no circles.
• The restarts weren't power cuts, as described above.

More help: the count keeps starting over.

Five quick restarts do exactly what Everything, (FACTORY RESET) does on the settings page: the Wi-Fi network and its password, a fixed address, the coin list, every setting and the Lock password are erased, and the coin pictures stay. The gesture can't keep the Wi-Fi; for that, use Start over (keep Wi-Fi) under Erase. The screen then shows “Factory Reset Done”, “Wi-Fi and settings erased” and “Restarting for setup...” for five seconds, and by then the erase is already complete. The ticker restarts into first-time setup with its own CT network, as in Setting up Wi-Fi.

The ticker shows its Wi-Fi card at start-up only when the signal is weak, and after that only when the connection is actually failing. The start-up showing comes once, before the first coin; a ticker with a good signal goes straight to its coins. While running, the card returns at most every 15 minutes, and only while the link needs attention: the connection has dropped three times within the last hour, or the signal is weaker than -85 dBm, where drops are only a matter of time. Each showing holds for 8 or 9 seconds.

The ticker waits for dropped connections because a signal reading is a poor guide to whether a link works. A ticker at -82 dBm on a clean channel can be rock solid, while one at -68 dBm beside a microwave with thirty neighboring networks can drop all day. The ticker notes the time of every disconnection, and three inside an hour show the link is misbehaving whatever the number says. A low reading on a link that isn't dropping never interrupts the coins, because that would report a problem the ticker doesn't have. System Info shows the running total as Reconnects, counted since the ticker last started.

The ticker takes a signal reading once a second and keeps a running average in which each new reading counts for a quarter, because a single reading is noisy even when nothing moves. Every decision uses that average. Weaker than -79 dBm is weak; from -79 to -67 dBm the ticker gives no verdict; -67 dBm or stronger is good. A verdict gets worse the moment the average crosses a line but improves only once the average is 5 dB clear of it, so a ticker parked on a line doesn't flip back and forth. The number is negative, and closer to zero is stronger: -50 dBm is a far better signal than -80 dBm. More: signal bars and dBm.

The Wi-Fi card has five rows:

• A title: “Weak Wi-Fi signal”; “Wi-Fi drops out” when dropped connections brought the card on; or “Wi-Fi signal” when you asked to see it and the signal isn't weak.
• A router, the Wi-Fi symbol and a thumb: red and down when the signal is weak, up when it is good, and no thumb in between, where there is no verdict to give.
• Your network's name.
• “Strength:” with a word and the reading, for example “Strength: Very Weak -85 dBm”. Above the weak line the words run from “Excellent” and “Strong” through “Good” to “Fair”; below it they are “Weak”, “Very Weak”, “Useless” and “Dead!”.
• The band and channel, for example “2.4GHz - Channel 6”.

When drops brought the card on, the ticker knows the link keeps failing but not why, so the card names the symptom rather than a cause. The ticker's radio uses 2.4 GHz only, so a Wi-Fi extender helps a weak reading only if it covers that band.

The ticker's repeats are switched by the Wi-Fi signal and Power boxes under Notify me of weak, in the Device card. Unticking a box stops that card's repeats and changes nothing else: the ticker runs the same either way. Neither box stops the single showing at start-up. Ticking a box puts its card on the ticker at once, even when all is well, so you can check the live signal or the measured voltage there and then.

The power check measures the ticker's own 3.3-volt supply, the voltage its processor runs on, so a healthy reading sits between 3.00 and 3.60 volts rather than at the 5 volts of a USB charger. The ticker reads it up to 40 times a second and judges it once a minute: the lowest reading of the minute against the low lines, and the average against the high lines. The dip decides the low side because a supply can average a healthy figure and still sag for an instant under load. The average decides the high side because a lone high reading is usually measurement noise, while a supply that stays high is the real concern. The dip during start-up, while the Wi-Fi connects, is recorded but kept out of the verdict, because every ticker dips there.

The power card has four warning faces, one for each way the supply can be off:

The large figure on the card is the dip for the low faces and the average for the high ones. A good verdict never brings the card on. A bad one shows it once whatever the Power box says, no earlier than 75 seconds after start-up so the figure comes from a full minute of readings, and then every 15 minutes while it lasts, if Power is ticked. It holds for 9 seconds, or 11 for the “very” faces. A verdict gets worse at once but improves only when the voltage clears the line by 0.05 V, so a borderline supply doesn't flicker between faces. More: the power check.

The ticker can measure its supply but can't see where a problem starts, so the card names the part you can change. On the low side, a thin or long USB cable loses voltage under load as readily as a tired adapter does, and the power warning the ticker shows during setup names both: “Use different USB cable” above “and/or power source.” A cable can only lose voltage, never add it, so for a high reading the card asks for a different power source instead.

The ticker keeps its scheduled cards at least 30 seconds apart, so the Wi-Fi and power cards, both on a 15-minute rhythm, never run back to back with each other or land on top of the address card. Right before it installs a software update, the ticker shows both cards in turn on purpose, with “All good, updating now” or “Not great, updating anyway” as the last line.