Can Sense auto-reconnect to WIFI? Onboard storage?

Technical Questions
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I’m just 3 days into my Sense deployment, loving what I see so far, even just with the instantaneous and historical power logging. But I’m seeing a problem that may be critical in my case.

My router is set to reboot every day at 12PM. I’m often away, and this seems to keep things smooth with my ISP, to minimize downtime. The reboot only takes a few seconds and the network is always back online within 2 minutes.

Unfortunately, it seems that Sense is unable to reconnect to the network after reboot, unless I power-cycle Sense.

The first day this happened (Friday), I was at work and noticed that Sense went offline at 12PM. It remained offline until I got home in the evening and power-cycled Sense. When I got home, I confirmed the WIFI network was up and online, but Sense had not reconnected.

I’m home today and observed the same. 12PM, WIFI reboots, Sense goes offline. By 12:02PM, WIFI is back online, internet connection confirmed. By 12:15PM, Sense had still not come back online, so I power-cycle Sense to bring it online.

This seems to be a critical issue. Granted, most people do not reboot their routers every day, but it’s not uncommon for a WIFI network to momentarily crap out, and if Sense cannot auto-reconnect, that’s a whole lot of lost data. Every other IoT device I’m aware of is able to handle this situation, including the last power monitor device I switched from.

A secondary related question is about onboard storage.

I took it as a given (assumed), that Sense would have onboard storage to log data during an offline network situation, and push to Sense cloud after reconnection. This does not seem to be the case, and all is lost during network downtime. Is this correct?

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It does, but it appears to be volatile memory and a power cycle flushes it. :confused:

The inability for Sense to reconnect to wifi is something I’ve seen quite a few users mention here.

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Ah, that’s a little bit of a bummer, but understandable. My main issue, then, is still really with the WIFI failure to auto-reconnect, and the necessity to power-cycle.

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Hi John,

Question - what firmware version is your Sense running.
You can find this via the web app here - https://home.sense.com/settings/sense%20monitor
or on your Mobile phone under Settings / My Home / Sense Monitor.

While there are still issues (hardware related) to a Sense not re-connecting after brownouts, I thought they had fixed the wifi issue a while back with a firmware update. I know I used to have the issue, but haven’t in over a year. I believe that your Sense will only check for updates overnight. Has your Sense been up and running the last three nights? (approx 3am ET). Also, can you tell from your Access Point / router about what the signal strength to your Sense is? I know others reported that the firmware updates sometimes didn’t take if the wifi signal to the Sense wasn’t so great to begin with. So I’m wondering if maybe you have compounding issues.

In any case, @RyanAtSense will probably chime in on Monday, but I know he is also going to suggest that you reach out to support as they may be able to look at logs and see if there is something else going on.

Also, to expand on Onboard storage. If power isn’t cycled, but internet were to go out, Sense is able to store around 6-8 hours of data. When the network connection is re-established, most of the time, it will eventually backfill the data.

SenseFirmware

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Thanks Ben.

Looks like we’re on the same firmware:
Version 1.11.1894-edea779-master

WiFi signal strength is great. Sense is about 10 feet from router.

I’ll hope to hear from/troubleshoot with Sense Monday.

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Oh well. It was worth a shot. Hopefully support will be able to get you straightened out.

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I gave sense device prioritization and reserved IP Within the router. Sense reconnects no problem after a reboot. It may help.

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Hey John. One of our engineers is going to reach out directly via PM to figure out what exactly is going on here.

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We have a tentative resolution for John’s issue. There is a DNS cache on the monitor which is being poisoned in some way during a router reboot. The monitor doesn’t benefit from the DNS cache, so I disabled it on John’s monitor, and if it’s successful in withstanding the repeated router reboots, we will roll that change out to everyone in the next software update.

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Thanks @JonahAtSense, @RyanAtSense, and team! Fantastic responsiveness and delivery of a solution. As we discussed, I’ll let you know if it has any trouble through the rest of the week’s reboots, but so far so good!

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I have a similar issue with Sense not reconnecting to wifi. After any power outage my Sense never seems to reconnect to my wifi. I have to power cycle sense to get it to reconnect. I suspect my sense powers up before my router reboots, but doesn’t seem like there is a retry to connect.

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