I was having way too much fun using my old Charge 2 that I hardly noticed that my replacement Ionic had arrived in the mail. I had little faith that the new one would be any better especially since it was shipped in a paper envelope with nary a bit of padding and the only other protection was tantamount to a zip-loc bag. (If you are wondering, the first Ionic died in 5 feet of water in the Caribbean Sea.) I digress. So today I decided to set up my <ahem> "new" tracker as I wasn't in the contention for winning this week's work-week challenge and the fear of loosing steps was minimal.
First annoyance: Setting up Wi-Fi. No Mac address on the welcome screen, nor box, nor packing slip. (what packing slip?) The first attempt was a wash as I needed to watch the router's access logs to figure out which MAC was trying to connect. Second go at it with the MAC address plugged into the router, still nothing. No fail message, the Ionic just times out back to the welcome screen AFTER setting up blue tooth and WiFi without any visible errors. I tested my sanity and attempted 2 more times and then I had an "ah-ha!" moment. Why not SKIP the WiFi setup and just use bluetooth? Seemed to work. after an hour it bombed. So I figure my Charge 2 wasn't playing nice with the blue tooth airwaves and it was banished to my bedroom on the second floor with hopes that this was far enough from the basement to avoid any interference. Seemed to do the trick! But wait, the little blue progress bar was moving mighty slow, I think 15 minutes amounted to 1% of progress, so hooked both phone and tracker up to the chargers and tried to make busy with other tasks for the day. couple of hours, seemed to speed up, great, I'm at 22% and had to go pick my daughter up from school. Phone in one pocket, tracker sand bands in the other. Check them at the school, both updating AOK. Hey, I'm on to something! I go shopping and check when we get home. 46%! Wow, I better not tempt the gods of fate, so I plug both back into their respective chargers and wait. Had dinner and started on a movie, 77% we are almost done! Phooey all those people saying they had to wait 12+ hours! finished dinner and went to check and my heart dropped. 89% - Update Failed and red X on the tracker. I figure I would go the techie route and checked my firewall's logs. I've talked enough and the day is getting short, so here is what worked for me so you don't waste your day like I did:
- Bluetooth firmware updating is painfully slow, get WiFi working at all costs.
- Bluetooth updating may not work reliably on non-mainstream phones. My LG V10 was unreliable, however paired and synced immediately with my Samsung Galaxy S6. .
- Disable MAC filtering on your router until the Ionic is completely configured, or you will waste time on the WiFi setup.
- Your network must be able to assign ip v4 addresses via DHCP. I dont know if ip v6 works.
- Set your router/firewall to hand out a known address to the Ionic so you can correlate network activity and assign bypass rules if needed.
- Your Ionic must use google public DNS (8.8.8.8) to resolve names, regardless of your router's or ISP's settings. If you are using a firewall, OpenDNS or some other DNS filtering, you will need to disable blocking of DNS requests.
- If you are behind a proxy or non-transparent gateway or any device caching web content, some handshaking with Fitbit's back end servers is probably going to get mangled and you will never connect. I had to completely bypass web filtering entirely since bypass rules for fitbit's servers were still not enough for the Ionic to connect.
Finally, 25 minutes left to the day and I have a GREEN SCREEN on my Ionic!!!
Yay! It was rainy outside anyway. Good luck and good night!
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