# Does the outdoor FLEX sensor reboot every 20 minutes?

**URL:** https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631
**Category:** Sensors
**Created:** [December 30, 2023, 4:00pm UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631 "2023-12-30T16:00:47Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Brice\_Ruth](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/brice_ruth/32/2973_2.png) [@Brice\_Ruth](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Brice_Ruth)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2023, 4:00pm UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/1 "2023-12-30T16:00:47Z")

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Or is it just mine? Seems like pretty regularly, the sensor reboots every 20 minutes (timings derived from uptime reported in `/json` endpoint) - sometimes it’s off by a few minutes, but

10:02:19  
09:42:33  
09:25:46  
09:05:00

Thoughts?

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### Author: ![Brice\_Ruth](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/brice_ruth/32/2973_2.png) [@Brice\_Ruth](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Brice_Ruth)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2023, 11:57pm UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/2 "2023-12-30T23:57:46Z")

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Huh, odd … after monitoring things for a few days … it suddenly stopped rebooting itself yesterday. The graph below shows two things -

1. before ~2pm on Dec 27, the sensor was just in a fast reboot loop (see other topic) every 30s.
2. from ~2pm on Dec 27 until ~noon on Dec 29, the sensor was rebooting every ~20min …

after ~noon Dec 29, there’s been no indication of reboot and to support this, the `uptime` field in the `/json` payload shows that it’s been up for 28h

 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/purpleair/original/2X/5/5eab85260b891a5daab8ef1ad6c0008a848acbab.png)

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### Author: ![Josh\_PurpleAir](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/josh_purpleair/32/2842_2.png) [@Josh\_PurpleAir](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Josh_PurpleAir)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2024, 12:50am UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/3 "2024-01-03T00:50:30Z")

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When a PurpleAir sensor can’t communicate with PurpleAir, [it will reboot once every 20 minutes](https://community.purpleair.com/t/why-is-there-a-gap-in-the-sd-card-data/6456). From Dec 27 to Dec 29, there was little or no communication from your sensor to our systems, causing these periodic reboots.

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### Author: ![Brice\_Ruth](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/brice_ruth/32/2973_2.png) [@Brice\_Ruth](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Brice_Ruth)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2024, 2:57pm UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/4 "2024-01-03T14:57:28Z")

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Gotcha, thx @Josh_PurpleAir. Is there output in the serial logs when that’s happening? I don’t recall seeing anything super obvious - I saw the JSON payload it was posting (trying?) to [www.purpleair.com:443](http://www.purpleair.com:443), or is that something else?

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### Author: ![Josh\_PurpleAir](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/josh_purpleair/32/2842_2.png) [@Josh\_PurpleAir](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Josh_PurpleAir)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2024, 4:51pm UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/5 "2024-01-03T16:51:53Z")

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There’s currently no indication over the serial port indicating the reason for the reboot, though this is something that could be added.

The JSON payload you saw is the [2-minute report](https://community.purpleair.com/t/understanding-purpleair-serial-output/3244#h-2-minute-report-4) the sensor sends to us.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Brice\_Ruth](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/brice_ruth/32/2973_2.png) [@Brice\_Ruth](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Brice_Ruth)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2024, 11:40pm UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/6 "2024-01-03T23:40:48Z")

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So it wouldn’t log any error code or similar if the 2-minute report didn’t send successfully?

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### Author: ![Josh\_PurpleAir](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/josh_purpleair/32/2842_2.png) [@Josh\_PurpleAir](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Josh_PurpleAir)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2024, 1:14am UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/7 "2024-01-04T01:14:23Z")

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If the 2-minute report doesn’t successfully send, there should be two lines of serial output:

- “Failed” with a number representing the milliseconds between the send attempt, and when a failure to send was determined
- “Error” with a negative number indicating the error

This is currently only reflected in serial output, and not in the locally served JSON data. [Other fields in JSON](https://community.purpleair.com/t/local-json-documentation/6917) do exist which can indicate failures to send, such as httpsuccess, httpsends, and the status indicators.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Brice\_Ruth](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.purpleair.com/brice_ruth/32/2973_2.png) [@Brice\_Ruth](https://community.purpleair.com/u/Brice_Ruth)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2024, 3:03am UTC](https://community.purpleair.com/t/does-the-outdoor-flex-sensor-reboot-every-20-minutes/7631/8 "2024-01-06T03:03:22Z")

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Cool, thanks - if I see it happen again, I’ll have something to look for. Appreciate the response!
