Just Bought your Filimin?
Wondering how to set it up? Is it doing something you don’t expect?
We’re here to help!
Before you can use your Filimin, you must configure it to your Wi-Fi. It’s an easy process and we’ll walk you right through it. Just visit and you’ll be up and running in no time.
“I just plugged my Filimin in and all sorts of things are happening. What’s going on?”
When you first plug your Filimin in, your Filimin will goes through what techies call a bootup process. The bootup process is similar in concept to what your computer or smart phone does when you first turn it on. And, like your computer or phone, you can safely ignore it and enjoy the light show. But if you wish to understand better or something unexpected happens and you want to know what’s going on, here’s a brief explanation of what you might see and what it means:
- Slow Pulsing Green: This is the first thing you will always see when you plug your Filimin in. Your Filimin is looking for a known Wi-Fi connection.
- Fast Pulsing Orange: If your Filimin does not find a known Wi-Fi connection, it will give up and let you know by pulsing orange quickly. This will happen if your Wi-Fi is out of range or if you need to configure your Filimin. You can configure your Filimin on our setup page and it is the first thing you should do after receiving your Filimin.
- Solid Yellow (units with newer Firmware only): Once your Filimin finds a Wi-Fi connection, it will conduct multiple security checks to guard against hackers, attackers, and other evil folk.
- Solid Red: After your Filimin finds a Wi-Fi connection, it looks for a software update. If it finds one, it downloads it and restarts itself. During this process you will see solid red. Software updates will happen only when you request them. In the normal bootup process you will see red for only a few seconds. During a software update, you will see solid red for a minute or two.
- Solid Teal: After your Filimin has confirmed that there are no software updates, it will connect to the other Filimins in your group, and let you know it is doing this by showing solid teal. You will typically see this for only a brief second.
- Celebratory Rainbow: Finally, after the bootup process was successful, your Filimin will celebrate by showing a rainbow. Your Filimin is connected to its friends and is happy. Time to touch it and tell your loved ones you are thinking of them!
Status Codes
Your Filimin needs to do all sorts of things when you initially plug in, such as find the Wi-Fi as well as its other Filimin friends. As it goes through this process, your Filimin will display patterns and colors of lights or “status codes.” If anything goes wrong in the process, the status codes can help you figure out what you might try.
It could also be that your Wi-Fi may not be in range. Try moving your Filimin to a different location.
After a minute or so, your Filimin will pulse a slow green color and try to connect to your Wi-Fi again. Hope springs eternal for your Filimin.
- Your Wi-Fi signal might be weak. Try moving your Filimin to a different location.
- Your Wi-Fi router may not be connected to the Internet. Confirm that other devices connected to your Wi-Fi are connecting to the Internet.
- There may be a corporate firewall preventing your Filimin from communicating. Talk to your network administrator and tell them that Filimin uses port 443, TLS/SSL encryption, and both HTTPS and MQTT protocols.
- If none of these solutions works or you need further help diagnosing, Contact us.. We’re happy to help.
- Your Wi-Fi signal might be weak. Try moving your Filimin to a different location.
- Your Wi-Fi router may not be connected to the Internet. Confirm that other devices connected to your Wi-Fi are connecting to the Internet.
- If you are behind a corporate firewall, it may be preventing your Filimin from communicating. Talk to your network administrator and tell them that Filimin uses port 443, TLS/SSL encryption, and both HTTPS and MQTT protocols.
If none of these solutions works or you need further help diagnosing, Contact us.
- Your Filmin successfully connected to other Filimins in the cloud or
- Your Filimin was correctly configured and is restarting.
Be Happy! Your Filimin is happy
- Your Wi-Fi signal might be weak. Try moving your Filimin to a different location.
- Your Wi-Fi router may not be connected to the Internet. Confirm that other devices connected to your Wi-Fi are connecting to the Internet.
- If you are behind a corporate firewall, it may be preventing your Filimin from communicating. Talk to your network administrator and tell them that Filimin uses port 443, TLS/SSL encryption, and both HTTPS and MQTT protocols.
If none of these solutions works or you need further help diagnosing, Contact us.
Troubleshooting
If things with your Filimin don’t go as you expect, this troubleshooting guide might help. Still stuck? No worries. Contact us and we’ll get things right for you and your loved ones
Turning your Filimin into a happy Filimin consists of:
- Creating an account in our manager
- Registering your Filimin
- Connecting your Filimin to your 2.4Ghz home Wi-Fi
From there you can make a group for you and your loved ones’ Filimins, or you can join a group your loved ones created for you! And you can set the colors, fade time and even set a sleep time so your Filimin won’t wake you up during certain hours.
Sound confusing? We have step-by-step guides for Windows, Mac, and mobile devices. We also have a special automated setup we can walk you through specifically for Windows devices that makes Wi-Fi setup even easier.
And if you have any trouble we are always ready to help.
The online setup is the standard setup which works on all devices, whether it be Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, Android or iOS.
For Windows users, we created the automatic setup as an alternative for the less technically proficient who wanted a simple way to connect their Filimins to their Wi-Fi without having to go through Wi-Fi settings, put in Wi-Fi passwords, etc. Additionally, the automatic setup gives more detailed errors that help with fixing problems when the Wi-Fi configuration fails. Automatic setup works, whether or not you remember your Wi-Fi name or password and, since no typing is involved, avoids typos or mistakes in capitalization, etc. However, automatic setup is successful only when your Windows device is already connected to a 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi connection and your device is using the standard Wi-Fi service which Microsoft provides for all Windows machines. If you aren’t sure about any of these things, have no fear. Nothing will blow up if you try automatic setup and it doesn’t work. And it’s a friendly little app that will give you some explanation if it fails to do its job.
Both setups should work, so just try one. If you have trouble…hey it’s nice to have options. 🙂
Do you see this when you run the automatic setup?
No problem! If you still have the alert window shown above open, choose “Abort.” Then go to the folder where the automatic setup was downloaded. On Chrome you’ll find it by clicking on the menu on the upper right, then choosing “Downloads:”
Where you see autoConfig.exe listed click on “Show in folder:”
Finally, when the folder shows up, right-click on autoConfig.exe and choose “run as administrator”
If your Filimin reacts to your touch by changing between solid colors, you have successfully connected your Filimin to your WiFi. If it is pulsing any color, it is not successfully connected.
- Move your Filimin closer to your device.
- Turn your device’s Wi-Fi off and on. This may refresh the list of Wi-Fi networks
- Unplug and replug your Filimin. Confirm it initially pulses green when you plug it in.
Still having problems? Contact Us.
- Triple-check your Wi-Fi name and your password. Passwords are case-sensitive. Sometimes they can be confusing and hard to read. A ‘zero’ might look like an 0 or vice versa, for example. Spaces in the name and password can also be confusing and mistyped.
- Sometimes your Filimin needs a few tries before it finally can connect. Leave it cycling between pulsing green and pulsing orange for 10 minutes.
- Unplug your Filimin, move it closer to your router, and try again. Once your Filimin connects, you can unplug it to move it back to where you want it.
- Restart your router: unplug your router, wait at least 15 seconds, then plug it back in. Your router will take a few minutes to restart itself then your Filimin may connect.
- If your router encryption is set at ‘WPA personal’, try changing it to ‘WPA2 personal’ and restarting your router.
Still having problems? Contact Us.
- Make sure you set your Filimin down before you plug it in as the touch calibration is calculated for the environment when initially plugged in.
- Make sure you aren’t touching your Filimin at all until it has fully started (after the celebratory rainbow).
- Make sure you are using your whole hand to touch it.
- Try another location to see if there is something in the location throwing the touch sensing calibration off (strong RF interference, metal table, etc.).
- If the touch sensing is still not working, leave your Filimin on and try it again in 5-10 minutes. If the initial calibration is off for some reason, your Filimin will gradually correct.
- Do you log into your Internet with a captive portal? (i.e. you have to log in in some way AFTER you connect to the WiFi. Starbucks does this for example)
- Are you behind a corporate firewall?
- Are you behind a University firewall?
- Did you connect to the guest network on your router? Filimins tend not to like guest networks.
- Is your WiFi internet is actually down? Maybe your router got unplugged from your modem, your modem is disconnected or literally your Internet is not working?
- Is there a security setting with your router blocking access for your Filimin?
Setting the color is just a matter of logging into our manager, clicking on your Filimin, and clicking and dragging the start and end colors on the color wheel:
You can log into our manager at any time to change the color range, fade time, or sleep times of your Filimin. You can also change the group your Filimin is in, create a new group, and invite others to join your group with their Filimins.
Our manager does not update the offline/online icon after the page loads so the status is probably out of date. Try refreshing the page by typing [CTRL]-r ([CMD]-r on a Mac.) If that does not work, unplug and replug your Filimin in, wait for it to complete booting up, confirm it is online and is responding to your touch with solid colors, then refresh the page on your browser..
Problems? Contact us and we’ll help.