Troubleshooting
What to check when the pedal will not join Wi-Fi, cannot find the console, or the LED is telling you a write did not land.
Updated
Read the LED first
The status LED tells you which stage is failing before you open anything.
| Pattern | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Fast blink, 100 ms on/off | Trying to join Wi-Fi. |
| Slow blink, 500 ms on/off | On Wi-Fi, trying to reach the console. |
| Short flash every 3 seconds | Connected and idle. This is the healthy state. |
| Double flash, then a pause | Captive portal is open, waiting for setup. |
| Fast red flutter | A write was never acknowledged after its retries. |
A slow blink that never becomes a heartbeat means the network is fine and the console is not answering — check the address and port before you touch the Wi-Fi settings.
It will not join the network
- Check the band. The ESP32-C3 has no 5 GHz radio. A network that is 5 GHz only is invisible to it.
- Check for client isolation. Guest networks routinely block devices from talking to each other, which lets the pedal join and then stops it reaching the console entirely.
- Start over. Hold the footswitch for three seconds at power-on to clear stored credentials and reopen the portal.
It joins but never finds the console
- Confirm the port:
10023for X32,80for Soundcraft Ui. - Confirm the console is on the same subnet. The pedal does not route.
- Try the IP address rather than an mDNS name.
- Check that no other application has taken over the console’s remote control session in a way that excludes new clients.
The LED flutters red
The pedal sent a write, retried it three times, and the console never confirmed it. This is working as designed — the alternative is a green light that means nothing.
Usually it means packet loss on a congested 2.4 GHz band. A stage is one of the worst radio environments there is. Options, roughly in order of effectiveness:
- Use a board with an external antenna.
- Move the access point, or add one nearer the stage.
- Pick a quieter channel.
- Put the console and the pedal on a network of their own.
The engineer’s changes keep disappearing
They should not — and if they do, check whether capture is enabled on the
mapping. Without it, release writes a fixed configured value rather than the
value captured at press time, which will undo their adjustments.
Everything is fine but the fader jumps
Small writes below a 0.01 threshold are suppressed, and writes are rate-limited to one per 100 ms per parameter, to avoid flooding the console. If you are seeing steps rather than a smooth ride, that is why: the pedal is built for discrete state changes, not for riding a fader.