Hi @mg.marsha.lehman ,
Thank you for taking the time to go through the setup again, and please thank your husband for helping as well. I really appreciate your effort in confirming how 334WXN and 337QXN are able to connect via the primary Wi-Fi point in their respective locations.
Let’s give it a day or two to see if the connection remains stable. I’ll monitor the data from my side and will update you once I’ve reviewed it.
Stanley
Marketing PM
Team GeoDrops
Stanley:
The device 334WXN stopped reporting yesterday morning. That’s Oct 29, about 7:30am. Here are screen shots that I have taken several times since then, starting at about 5:30pm yesterday.
Despite a good wi-fi signal, the device has gone off-line.
What do you see on your side??
Sorry for the late response. Before I continue I would like to understand the current situation is for the devices. Is 337QXN placed ant where 334WXN and vice versa? 337QXN is offline and 334WXN was offline until yesterday where it seems to think it is no longer in soil or having poor soil contact. Have you taken out the devices are are they still in place?
Thanks
Al
Al:
I have NOT taken the devices out of the soil; they are still in place. I have not worked in those two beds since installing the devices. As it happens, there are blueberry bushes in both areas.
And yes, the two devices swapped places in the garden. Only 334WXN was connected to our primary wi-fi node. (337QXN stayed on the secondary node).
334WXN had gone offline, as noted in an earlier post. Last evening, I noticed that it had come back on-line. This is really puzzling, as I did absolutely nothing to that device. As I wrote this response, I checked the device – and 334WXN has gone offline again. I have no idea what is going on with this device. It shows “good” signal strength (-70dBm). I also noted the battery level is reported as 76% at 1.48V. Do I need to put in fresh batteries? I can do that, and at the same time I will note that the batteries have been in the device for about 3 months. I would expect them to last longer than that.
And as you noted, 337QXN has now gone offline. It had been slow to update, which triggered many notifications. It often took 6-9 hours to update. It was connected to the secondary wi-fi node. The battery level shows as 80% (1.51V). The signal strength shows as “poor" (-80 dBm). I can probably improve that by connecting it to the primary wi-fi node. (That will require additional cooperation from my husband. I will try to make that happen today and see if it stays on-line.)
Marsha Lehman
This is indeed very strange. This does not seem to be an issue of wifi strength but difficulty in connecting with the wifi AP. I don’t think you need to put in fresh batteries at the moment. This issue might not be easy to resolve so I would have to gather more information first. Is it possible for you to let us know of the model of your wifi routers / AP and the setup, in particular such as things like:
Wifi repeaters
Port/IP restrictions/ whitelisting etc.
More complex router/networking setup
If you do not know you can always send us a photo. We may eventually ask you to do more things with the device as this problem might require more interactive “debugging”. I will keep updating you as we progress. In the mean time, I have noticed that the AP named “TDS2849-Guest” seems to be most stable. If possible please try connecting to that AP to use the device
Thank you very much for bearing with us. We will try to get to the bottom of this
Al
Engineering
Al:
The device 334WXN is still off-line. It had previously been connected to TDS2849-Guest. When it went off-line the first time, you and your team suggested I connect it to the primary wi-fi node. I did that, and it worked for a while. But as you see, it has gone off-line.
At this point, I am pausing. The reason is that sometime on Friday, Nov 7, we are upgrading our internet service to increase speed. This requires a technician making a change at the provider’s box on our property. I also suspect that it will include a new router.
Once our new service is established, I will reconnect both 334WXN and 337QXN to our wi-fi.
I really want these devices to work reliably, as I actively garden for ten months of the year. I will not be putting devices to rest for the winter.
Marsha Lehman
OK – I have good news and bad news.
With the upgrade in our internet service today, we now have a single wi-fi AP and a better router. That’s the good news.
This also meant that I had to pull all four of my devices to update the wi-fi connection.
The good news is that the two devices that I got from the 2025 production (one in April and the other May) both updated easily. Time will tell if they stay on-line.
The bad news is that the two older devices (a 2023 beta and a 2023 production) started off fine. In fact, I got a message that the wi-fi connection was made. But a split second later, I got this lovely message that indicates you think this is not an authentic device. This happened for both of the 2023 units. They were working find (as authentic devices) until I made the new wi-fi connection.
Why would you think these 2023 devices are no longer authentic? Now what do I do? I have already tried three times on each device.
More importantly, what will you do??
Marsha Lehman
This happens to some of our beta devices have this issue when we pushed out he production version. I will get back to you once I have fixed this on our end. The device is definitely still usable
Thanks
Al
Engineering
Please try again with the old devices.
The 2023 devices appear to be working and reporting data.
Marsha
It’s now been about twelve hours since I connected all four devices to our new internet router. The “non-authentic” issue with the 2023 devices seems to have been resolved. If you helped resolve that issue – thank you!
Of the two 2025 devices, the “problem” device, 334WXN, is still in soil sensing mode, and last sent data 12 hours ago. This is not a good sign. The batteries are good (above 1.5V) as I tested every battery as I was making the new wi-fi connection. It shows “GOOD” signal strength at -46 dBm. Again, this device, 334WXN, is a replacement device for an earlier unit that failed. This device is behaving exactly like the failed device. I am not optimistic. It seems that the April 2025 batch has an issue. How many other users are having issues with devices from that batch? What do you see on your side??
Marsha
PS My other 2025 device, 337QXN, (manufactured in May) is reporting data and appears to be functioning just fine. It also has “GOOD” signal strength at -58 dBm).
Update:
Device 334WXN, which was my primary concern, came out of soil sensing mode sometime overnight. It appears to be working well. It shows a “GOOD” signal strength.
Device 337QXN, which was not causing concern, has now gone off-line, despite showing a “GOOD” signal strength.
I continue to get the “MAX SOIL MOISTURE” notification on multiple devices – without having any additional rainfall. I have no idea what is going on, but it appears that the message generation is still stuck.
Both of my older devices (2023) are now showing a message bout not gripping the soil firmly. I do know how to install the sensors properly; I have done it more times than I can count. I will re-seat them later this morning.
Needless to say, I am losing confidence in these devices. Perhaps they will work well for folks with lawns who put them in place and leave them there.
They are not working well for home gardeners growing veggies and small fruits. I used to move them from bed to bed and that just didn’t work well, largely due to the time required to recalibrate in each new location. I then decided to put them in beds that have small fruits (strawberries, blueberries) and leave them there. No more moving the sensors around.
It seems that each new update adds a feature that I don’t need or want. (I understand that; I’m not into turf.) What is more significant to me is that each update seems to break some older feature, seems to cause the device to generate spurious notifications, and/or stops providing useful data.
I have been a beta tester since June 2023. I am about to throw in the towel and call it quits.
Hi @mg.marsha.lehman ,
I apologize for the late response. I will let @homedigy-alpha respond further regarding 337QXN. Regarding the 2023 devices, I will check with engineering to see if it’s related to this thread (which I recall seeing your posts there as well).
I know this has already taken a lot out of you, and I really appreciate you hanging in there while we sort it out. Once I have feedback from engineering, either I and engineering will follow up with you and let you know what we find.
Best,
Stanley
Marketing PM
Team GeoDrops
The good news is that device 337QXN has come back online. The bad news is I have no idea why it went offline. And I took no action to try to bring it back online; it simply came back online on its own.
Marsha
Let me look over the devices in question and what they did over the weekend
Thanks
Al
Engineering
As the engineering team is working to resolve an issue affecting a certain portion of fleet, we’ll need more time to fully investigate this.
Thanks for your patience,
Stanley
Marketing PM
Team GeoDrops
Hi Marsha,
I finally had a chance to look over your devices. They are functioning correctly, but it does seem like wifi connection is still a bit spotty. FYI, the way we determine sending the user the notification that the device is offline is when the device fails to contact the server for more than 24 hours. However we usually only contact the server a few times a day to conserve battery in normal situation. A couple of misses due to spotty connectivity would sometimes trigger the offline message. I have checked the data from your sensor and they are correct and consistent so despite the connectivity issue the device is functioning correctly. Perhaps we should modify the message a bit so it would not seem as bad as it seems. We do plan to have another firmware update for a range of minor fixes and battery improvements. We will take this into account when we update the firmware and maybe make it more forgiving with spotty connections.
Thanks for your patience Marsha and let me know if you see any other issues.
Al
Engineering
Hi @mg.marsha.lehman ,
Do you still need assistance on this thread? If not, I will go ahead and close this thread.
Thanks,
Stanley
Marketing PM
Team GeoDrops
Close it. I’ve learned to ignore the off-line message, as the device comes back on-line on its own.
Marsha
