Hey there!
I finally got my Tidbyt today! Awesome!
But I had a couple super annoying issues connecting and I thought I’d write up a post about them so that anyone else experiencing the same issue can find this and feel better that they’re not the only schmuck that went through this. Or maybe read this first and not be worried about it. I dunno, maybe there’s something somewhere that covers all this, but I sure didn’t see it.
Here were my issues:
- I don’t broadcast my SSID. Security through obscurity and all that. But the Tidbyt app doesn’t like that one bit.
- I usually use my 5Ghz wireless network. Not sure if it’s the app or the Tidbyt itself, but that ALSO doesn’t fly.
After a very frustrating hour of wrangling with my router (Netgear R6700v3 [if anybody cares] that has an app that doesn’t let me set any of the settings I need) and fighting Chrome I eventually got everything working. So that’s good.
Here’s what I did:
My dumb router actually has two wireless networks and broadcasts in both 5Ghz AND 2.4Ghz. I got lucky there. So I just enabled the SSID Broadcast of the 2.4Ghz network (after doing the wrong one first), let the thing reboot, connected my Tidbyt in the app, set up a couple apps to make sure it was working and then disabled the SSID Broadcast and let it reboot again. The Tidbyt said “connecting…” and once the router rebooted… it reconnected!
What a relief!
So anyway, that worked for me. If anybody else wants to not broadcast their SSID and connect their Tidbyt, you can. Eventually.