Hello, I have set up several sensors for our college. To do this I have to register the sensors MAC address and connect it to our hidden network. This works fine on all my sensors, except one. I have included the registration and successful association of the email and Device ID. My network manager insists that the MAC has to have one more character after the a xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:a Can you help? I have checked all three labels and they all seem to be missing one character.
I’m not a PurpleAir dev, but this could be just a formatting error - try ‘0a’ for the last octet, instead of just ‘a’.
Take to balky one and install it on your home network. The process should read the mac address from the device. Then scan your network, for example using LanScan (e.g. in demo mode) from your computer or smartphone. The device listed as “Expressif Inc” is your Purple Air comms device, and the mac address is given in the scanning report.
Yes. This seems like a display bug. All MAC addresses are 48 bit, containing six 8-bit octets. That last octet is probably 0x0A (hexadecimal for 10) and the leading zero (the 0 of 0a) was stripped by wherever you’re getting that. Obviously hexadecimal should be padded when they’re in a MAC address. Hope this helps!
Having said that, isn’t your hardware (MAC) address plastered all over the box and device itself? My Zen had like four or five barcode stickers!
Edit: Ahh the sticker has the missing digit. Yeah, probably ends in 0A and they just removed the leading digit. Can you connect your device to your phone or local computer to check it?
Yes, I registered the last octet as 0a and I was able to connect it to our network. I looked at the data on the sensor and saw that it successfully checked for an update. So, I am good. The MAC address is plastered on both the box and the sensor itself, but both of those were missing the 0 from that las octet. So it sounds like whoever prints out the labels for PurpleAir may have a problem with how it displays hexadecimal 10?
Yes, a number of the comments here have described this correctly. The key is that the MAC address and the Device ID are not the same. If there is a leading 0 in any octet, it will not appear in the Device ID.
Therefore, when you’re registering the sensor, use the Device ID as it appears on your sensor’s sticker. When viewing the MAC address on the network, any octet with a single character will show up with a leading 0.