garmin connect doesn’t connect firmware to users
Berend De Schouwer
Who Is This Post For?
Anyone who has tried to connect a Garmin smart device to the cloud with Garmin Connect.
Anyone who has tried to connect any smart device that has no keyboard to any cloud anywhere.
What Device
A Garmin Index S2 scale. This is a human weight scale that can upload your weight to the cloud.
The connects to the cloud directly via wifi. It can connect to a phone via bluetooth, but only for wifi configuration. Everything after that goes via wifi.
Even small things like 12/24 hour clock configuration go via wifi.
The scale has no keyboard, and a limited screen, so configuration is via a phone.
Problem Experienced
The scale does not send any weight data to the cloud. The scale does not receive any configuration changes from the cloud.
The scale does display weight data, and a wifi signal strength icon.
The scale does not display any errors. There is no indication that anything is wrong.
Garmin Connect App on the phone does not display any errors. It claims everything is working.
More About Garmin Connect
- Garmin Connect means two different things:
- A Phone App, used to configure various devices
- A Web App, used to view the data
More About Errors Not Displayed
On the Scale
The scale doesn’t show wifi errors. It can display some text, like your name, but doesn’t even show E123, or any other error code. The user believes it works.
The scale does show a wifi signal strength icon (triangle, 4 lines for strength), and displays a sync icon (twirling circle).
Neither icon changes to an error (red X, for example.) The user is lead to believe it works.
On the Phone
The phone does not show any errors, wifi or otherwise.
The phone does display setup complete.
The phone app let’s you test wifi. It’s a bit complicated, but you can. It will then display Wifi Connected OK.
Suspected Error
Eventually, after re-configuring hundreds of times, I suspect an network error. I suspect the scale is trying to connect to garmin.com on a non-standard port.
It’s not that, but it gives…
The Only Error Displayed
Hours later, I finally look on the router. I’m looking at the network traffic, and see:
4-Way handshake failed for ifindex: 3, reason: 15 KEY_SEQ not returned in GET_KEY reply
So I know wifi isn’t working. The WPA2 handshake is not completing even though the phone app thinks the scale’s wifi is OK.
Non-specified Requirements
Bluetooth or Wifi? Bluetooth and Wifi
When you configure the scale, you should eventually see a message on Garmin Connect on the phone that sync completed, along with a green icon.
If you do not see this, the scale is on a different wifi network than the phone.
Why would that be? In my case the phone is on a 5G network (because it can) and the scale is on a 2.4G network (because it can’t)
Until you put the phone on the same network as the scale, the last message you will see is: configuration completed, not sync completed, and this means that the scale is not working.
At this point, the scale isn’t syncing to the Garmin cloud. It’s just synced it’s configuration with the phone.
WPA? WPA2? WPA1.5
The scale claims to support WPA2 on a 2.4G network.
For a device was first announced in 2020, this is attrocious, but that’s true for a lot of these smart devices.
Even then, it doesn’t work with the entire gamut of WPA2 protocols.
In my case, I had to swap from iwd to wpa_supplicant to connect the scale.
Questions for Garmin
- Why do you display that the wifi network tested OK when the 4-way handshake failed? Couldn’t you add a connections to https://test.garmin.com or something?
- Why do you not display a sync error message on either, but preferably both the scale and phone app?
- Why do you not check that the phone and scale wifi are the same? The setup fails silently otherwise.
- Why do you display configuration complete, when it isn’t yet complete?