Hello! I just got my Tidbyt today and I can’t seem to connect it to my dorm wifi due to myself being unable to enter my username for the school wifi. Does anyone know how this can be resolved? I’m super excited about my tidbyt but I cant use it without wifi. Thanks!
I think by User Name, you mean that your dorm has a captive portal that requires login to access to Wifi. I don’t know if Tidbyt supports Captive Portal to gain access to a Wifi network. Maybe one of the engineers can provide details.
There are a few posts on Wifi running about. About a year ago the Tidbyt could connect to the following according to this post. Doesn’t look like they have enabled guest wifi yet though based on some recent posts.
If you know what type of wifi your dorm has that also may help the engineers help you out.
you might also try running it off of you phones wifi hotspot if it has one.
It seems that my dorm’s wifi is WPA2 Enterprise, I’m guessing that is not able to connect with the Tidbyt? There is another method that has been used with other electronics like Xbox’s that include submitting the MAC Address of the device but I don’t think that works with the Tidbyt either
@zanary is correct, this sounds like a captive portal. Tidbyt does not support this, and it’s unlikely we will be able to.
@AtsideZ There’s a bunch of folks using Tidbyts in dorms, and the general deal is that Tidbyt should be able to connect to anything that you can connect to with an Alexa or Google Home. The two approaches that work:
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Many students setup their own Wi-Fi router in their room, which is connected by ethernet to the university network.
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The MAC address method. That totally works and it’s great that your university supports this.
Tricky part is finding the MAC address of your device. We shipped in a hurry and didn’t have time to add a barcode label to every device with the MAC address.
Options for this:
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I’m working on an app update to print out the MAC address on the Tidbyt phone app. This will be out soon-ish.
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If you download the diagnostic data from your device and send it over, I can derive your MAC address from it and tell you what it is.
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Another option @AtsideZ can try is to turn on Hot Spot on a phone and then connect the Tidbyt to that WiFi. Then on the phone go in and look at the details of the connected Tidbyt.
@AtsideZ I would just run your own Wi-Fi router as suggested by @rohan. You are going to keep running into these issues with other devices, so it’ll make things easier on you. One tip I have, I know some universities don’t like you setting up your own router, so make sure you hide the SSID when broadcasting. The process would be the same, with needing to find the MAC address of the router, and then registering it in the captive portal setup by the school.
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Running your own wifi router is typically against the policies at universities.
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Arise, thread, and stagger into the night!!!
I’m considering purchasing one of these units for my office, but my office is (much like these dorms) in a university and we have a captured portal wifi thing going on. I definitely don’t want to run it off my phone (a la hotspot) and setting up a separate wifi router for this purpose is going to be shot right down by IT.
Somebody mentioned 'it’s set up similarly to how you’d set up Alexa or Google Home", and that’s cool… except I can take care of any itchy portals from the phone app and it just sorta ‘works’.
Anyway, Is this issue with captive portals somehow resolved, or is it still something that folks are running into? I’ve got plenty of ghome devices at home - this is neat and all but doesn’t really offer anything over that and I figured it’d be a great addition to my office environment but I’m thinking it may not work out. 
Thotts?
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I am trying to use my Tidbyt at work but our guest wifi requires the user to authenticate via a ‘captive portal’ but the Tidbyt doesn’t support this. I contacted support and they said some people use a travel router as a work around which I will try tomorrow. I was able to use my personal hotspot which is fine since I have unlimited data but once not in proximity to the Tidbyt the connection is lost.
Anyone struggle with this scenario and found a work around?
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I reached out to support today because I am running up against this at my work office. Tidbyt told me they don’t support captive portal and probably never will. So the options were to use a travel router to connect to the office wifi to pass the captive portal, then sync your Tidbyt to the travel router. I am going to try that but also may not work due to security constraints. The other option would be to have the IT company at my work use the MAC and whitelist my device, I opened a ticket to see if they allow that. If not I will be bringing it back home to my personal office and use my home wifi.
Yeah unfortunately there is no standard that I’m aware of for captive portals (edit: there is a standard, but the standard is not… standard. long story), so there’s no way for us to support them.
@josesierra You’re actually able to connect a Google Home even though there’s a captive portal? If so, that would be news to me and we could explore how they do it. But as far as I know it’s not possible.
@rohan To be fair, we set up Alexa on our captive portal and not a Google Home, so there’s that. It’s been the hottest of minutes since we set it up, so I can’t recall how the heck we made it work. I just know that it works and we have the Alexa with the little baby screen and a handful of echo dots around the office.
The whole thing makes me sad… I’d love to make it work for my office but I fear that it will never be. Is there no way to maybe plug it in via USB to the compooter and have the pooter act as the browser for authentication, then store whatever authentication token and info onto the device itself? I know I’m going full meta with it, but it’s been whole decades since I was buried in code and I was never that great at it to begin with lol. I’m sure y’all have considered all the angles, I’m just flailing in the dark lol.
My wife and kids got this for me for Christmas for my work office. I am gathering from this thread that not only can I not use this at work (due to secure or guest WiFi), but there will likely never be support for such use cases. I tried to get the MAC address for this device in the off chance I could get IT to whitelist it, but even that has proven impossible. It’s very frustrating. Is there any hope or should we seek a refund?
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Just an update, I was successfully able to use it via my travel router. I have a Hoo Too HT-TM05 and will just leave that at my office to run my Tidbyt!
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@bailey800 Our support team can help with refunds via [email protected].
If you need the MAC address, that should actually be displayed during the setup process, under the list of Wi-Fi networks.
Just letting you all know that I just simply moved out of my dorms and into a regular apt with normal standard wifi and it’s working now. I have not been able to find a solution sadly.
You can try the travel router approach.
- I setup my travel router to connect to my company’s guest wifi.
- I accepted the captive portal as part of that process via the UI once logged into my travel router.
- Then I connected the Tidbyt to the wifi that my travel router supports.
- Setup Tidbyt and just leave my router at the office to support the Tidbyt.
- Successful until IT comes and shuts me down for it haha.
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Maybe there’s a way to integrate a travel router into the tidbyt lol…?
If it works, it works… 
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