Support

Troubleshoot Inactive Wi-Fi devices

Why are my Wi-Fi devices appearing as inactive?

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Why are my Wi-Fi devices appearing as ‘inactive’, and no data is being reported?

Wi-Fi devices may appear ‘inactive’ for many reasons. You can use the Inactive Deployments Report in the Portal to diagnose why your devices are appearing as inactive.

The Inactive Deployments Report will help you to identify the following issues:

No data

No data has ever been reported to the Cloud successfully. This usually indicates that the device was setup incorrectly, e.g. using incorrect Wi-Fi credentials. Please try to set up your device again, and double-check that you’ve got the Wi-Fi password correct.

In rare cases, there could be an incompatibility with the Wi-Fi access point. Please double-check that your Wi-Fi access point(s) are compatible with AirSuite devices.

Power loss

Power loss is detected if the device’s USB cable has been unplugged, or the power was switched off at the wall, but the device was still able to continue reporting to the Cloud while operating on its backup battery (operational for up to 24hrs).

’Power loss’ is the assumed cause of failure if the device remains operational until its battery discharges completely. However, if the device becomes inactive while the battery is only partially discharged, the report may instead diagnose one of the other causes of failure below.

Network outage

A network outage may be caused by the power being switched off for the whole building, as the device will typically lose Wi-Fi connectivity immediately, meaning it is unable to transmit any more reports (because the Wi-Fi access point will also be powered off).

It may also be caused by a change in the network configuration that prevents the device from connecting to the Wi-Fi access point, such as a change to the Wi-Fi credentials, firewall, VLANs, or broadcasting channel(s).

Note that it can be reasonably common for power to be switched off in some schools and other buildings overnight, and devices will reconnect as expected when the power is turned back on the next morning.

Device relocated

We assume that a device may have been relocated if we detect that it has lost power, but it stops reporting shortly after, while its battery is still fully charged.

A relocation is likely to be accompanied by a change in Wi-Fi signal strength (RSSI), which indicates that the device was moved further away from the Wi-Fi access point. We recommend investigating this manually to confirm the hypothesis.

Network connectivity

Network connectivity issues are identified if we detect a flaky network connection (if the device disconnects and reconnects frequently). This may be caused by the device being too far away from the Wi-Fi access point, interference from other network devices, or other problems with the Wi-Fi access point.

Deployment corruption

In very rare cases, where an error occurs while creating a new deployment, a device may continue transmitting data for its previously configured deployment.

This is easily resolved by setting up the device again in the AirSuite Monitor app.