Emergency reset with a USB stick

Two things can leave you locked out of your own hub: you have forgotten the password of its panel, or you want to wipe it back to how it left the factory — before selling it, for instance.

Both are solved the same way. You issue a file in your account on this site, copy it to a USB stick, and put the stick into the hub. You do not write anything yourself and you do not create any file: it is downloaded ready.

There are two files, one for each case. One resets only the way into the panel and leaves everything else alone. The other erases what you put into the hub: your devices, your plan, your objects, your scenarios, your history, and the settings of your home network. What the factory put in stays.

Both put the panel sign-in back where it started: the serial number, and the registration code from the “Register” sticker. So this road leads somewhere only while you still have that sticker. If it is gone and your own panel password is forgotten too, the hub's own panel cannot be opened again — the code is printed once, we hold only a fingerprint of it, and we never issue a new one. Your home is not lost in that case: a linked hub keeps working and you reach it from your account, here and in the app. It is the local panel that stays shut. Which is why the page about starting out tells you to photograph the label.

One part is not ready yet, and it is worth saying exactly how it will arrive, because the obvious guess is wrong. Reading the stick is something a hub is built with, not something an update brings: the pieces that do it sit outside the part of the hub that updates itself. A hub gets them with the card it was made on. Hubs made from now on will have it; a hub made earlier will not get it by updating, however long it waits. You can issue the file already, and until a hub that can read it is in your hands, putting the stick in will do nothing at all. If you have an older hub, write to support@dotrama.com rather than keep trying: there is no road for it today, and we would rather say so than let you spend an evening on it. This paragraph goes when the first hubs that can read a stick are with people.

The button that issues the file is in your account on this site, on the page of the hub it belongs to. It asks you to confirm your password first, and the full reset asks once more, with a list of what will go.

A file is good for 24 hours from the moment you issue it, and the hub accepts it a single time. After that it is a dead file: a copy left in Downloads or on the stick will do nothing.

That is deliberate. A file without an end would stay a key to your hub for anybody who later reached that laptop or that stick. If you need it again, issue it again — it takes a moment, and you are in your account anyway.

Each file is made for one hub and signed by us. Another hub will not take it, and the hub checks the signature by itself, without the internet.

• Issue the file in your account: open the hub, press «Issue a reset file», choose which of the two you need, and download it.
• Take the Zigbee adapter out of the hub's USB port. The hub has one port and the adapter lives in it; you will put it back at the end.
• Put the file on a USB stick — an ordinary one, formatted as FAT32 or exFAT, which is what Windows gives you by default. Copy the file as it is: do not unzip it, do not rename it. It can lie in the root of the stick or inside one folder.
• Put the stick into the hub's port and wait. The hub has to be switched on and running for at least two minutes: a stick pushed in earlier, or into a hub that is off, is ignored on purpose — otherwise a stick forgotten in the port would fire at every power cut. If you were too early, pull the stick out and put it back in.
• Wait for the hub to raise its own Wi-Fi network — the one named after its serial number. That is the sign that the reset happened. If you were already connected to that network, wait for it to appear again.
• Take the stick out and put the Zigbee adapter back.

Give it a minute. A file the hub will not take gets one short signal, and that signal is the same whatever the reason — so go through the causes you can check yourself. Four are common: the file is more than a day old; it was issued for a different hub; it has already been used once; or there is more than one reset file on the stick, and then the hub takes none of them. Leave a single fresh file on the stick, issued for this hub, and try again.

The hub says no out loud — with that short signal — so that silence is never the only answer you get. But the signal does not say which of the reasons it is: the hub writes that down for itself, and we can read it. So if the file is fresh, issued for this hub, and alone on the stick, and the hub still refuses it — write to support@dotrama.com rather than guessing from a beep.

The hub comes up as it did on its first day: its own Wi-Fi network, the panel entered with the serial number and the registration code from the sticker, and nothing of your home inside it.

If the hub was living on your home network, it is not any more: set the network up again, the same way you did the first time.

None of this helps if the hub's memory card has failed — a hub that does not start cannot read a stick. Such a hub comes back to us and is rebuilt, and what was on the card is lost. That is why the cards we put in are the expensive kind.