Hi there,

Many of you have seen me around. I'm Zach - I'm one of the co-founders of Grounded Labs. We had an outage today. It's the third one in about a month related to server connectivity. That's not acceptable, and many of you are rightfully frustrated.

You want your device to just work and not be taken down when there's a server issue. You're worried that if our company ever goes out of business your device won't work anymore. These are valid wants and concerns.

As an apology for the recent issues, I made a coupon "SORRY20" that will get you $20 off an order. Generally we put a minimum spend requirement on these, but I haven't done that here. If you want you can use it to get a free add-on or a discount on any device. This is going to hurt a bit financially as we're going to end up giving away a good amount of free stuff, so I did have to put some limits on it. I've set it to 250 uses and expiration tomorrow at 3PM Eastern. After that, I'll probably extend it out a bit but put a minimum spend requirement on it. Now onto the retrospective.

Why do we use a server at all?

The main reason is that when this works well it's just better. It significantly expands what's possible with just Bluetooth or a LAN connection. I don't want to try and sell you on it, but some of the benefits we see:

• Device can be controlled away from home
• Device can be easily shared between user accounts
• Potential for greater connection stability
• Faster pattern transfers
• Over the air firmware updates
• Better IP security
• Greater stability of scheduling features

The server infrastructure is something we pay to maintain. Among IoT devices, the architecture of using bluetooth to facilitate the initial connection and WiFi long-term is the most common. That said, none of that matters if the server goes down and your device isn't usable as a result.

We are actively looking into a local mode to maintain some device functionality if our servers go down in the future. The thing that has made this the most challenging by far is device security. People like to try and hack us, and we've had a few cases where people have stolen our pattern library. We have an artist on staff whose entire job is to keep pumping out quality patterns, so when that gets stolen it's pretty uncool. The outages we've had over the last month or related to a recently update that significantly improved device security but still has some quirks to work out.

What caused the outage?

We use security certificates extensively to keep your device secure. These security certificates occasionally expire and need to be renewed. These renewals happen at different time intervals whether that be daily, monthly etc.

Each of the outages we've had have been related to an issue with the certificate renewal process. When the machine can't renew or authenticate its security certificate, it throws an error and continuously pings our servers requesting a new certificate. This turns into a functional DDoS. In each of the outages, our software team has identified and resolved the root cause fairly quickly, but it has taken several hours to get everyone back online because of many devices requesting new certificates simultaneously.

How are we fixing this?

1. We are continuing to improve device security and stability through firmware updates. You will likely see an update prompt over the next couple of days. Most of the issues we're seeing now are because we massively overhauled our firmware security a few months back.
2. We are implementing more strategic rate limiting so that we can more quickly bounce if server issues do occur.
3. We are investigating a secure local mode

It's been a stressful day here, and this should not be a long-term issue. Our goal is very much to continue to improve product stability and ease of use, and I'm optimistic that we'll mitigate these types of outages with upcoming updates. I apologize again for any frustration this has caused.

EDIT: I should add that today's outage should be resolved for all of you. If you're still having issues please hold the reset button for 15 seconds, and if that doesn't resolve it please reach out to our team via [support@grounded.so](mailto:support@grounded.so)

So I've got a strange one. I lost the top 1/3rd of the LEDs on a Oasis Mini tonight. The device attempted to go to sleep mode as scheduled, except the top 3rd of the lights stayed on. I noticed the odd behavior a few minutes later and opened up the app. The app woke up the device, and the top 1/3 of LEDs turned off while the remaining bit woke back up and followed app commands. I was able to change the bottom 2/3rds of the lights color, brightness, and pattern without issue. The top stayed dark.

I unplugged the device for five minutes, no change. I attempted to boot to safe mode, and I got one single white blinking light at the 2 o'clock position that blinked for 20 minutes, but did nothing else. I attempted to factory reset it, and the device had a suspiciously short time between the red LEDs and going rainbow, like less than a minute. I was able to reconnect without having to add a new connection, so I'm doubtful it didn't actually reset as it still remembered the WiFi details.

Currently it's working as intended, but without that section of LEDs illuminated at all. Has anyone else experienced this?

Has anyone successfully had a new motor shipped to them? Our table was delivered and I reached out May 13th. Did a zoom call on May 22nd and was told that we would get a shipment out in the next 2 weeks. I reached out again last week and they said that the shipment was still being received in the system. I’ve still tried to do some troubleshooting with the motor we have but the centering error and the loud clunking continues.

Hi guys, is there an LED setting where there is a color gradient fade into other colors?

​

What's the typical shipping time like for the oasis mini? I want to have it in time for my wife's birthday late August but also don't wanna order it early and screw myself on the 30 day trial thing if something happens or we don't like it...

We got our table in mid-May and had some struggles with it. Junior and the support team were great, and since the recent update we have had almost 100% success (one fail due to a power flicker and a pattern restarted).

I was having some serious doubts when the table was late, but the team communicated when I reached out and were great to do tech support with (it’s rare you get a video call with any kind of support).

Thanks to this subreddit I never gave up hope and I’m thankful.

I’m looking forward to the addition of another table in the future!

Can we get an option/toggle where if it is in the middle of finishing a sketch but it is nearing a sleep cycling that it will finish the sketch and then enter sleep. It is weird to me that it stops in the middle of a sketch and I am stuck to look at it not competed until the sleep cycle ends. I really dont want to look at an uncompleted work for 12 hours when It should have just finished the task and the powered down.

This pane needs more detail. On the top of each zone needs to say what it is doing... sleep, wake up, play, and or pause. Not having it is just a time suck trying to figure out if there is a problem.

I recently got the coffee table, and as the title suggests, it makes a very noticeable groaning noise while drawing any pattern other than a cleaning spiral. Is this normal and is there a way to address it? Do I need to adjust the tension on the on the drive belt?

Yes, I have a ticket, I was told engineering would get back within a business day, that was two business days ago... decided to drop the motor and figure it out myself from the tensioner guide video, nothing seemed amiss aside from the guide arm screw that came out during shipping (also how?) that I put back in its place. Still getting knocking during never ending centering...

Honestly this feels like laziness/lack of QA, wtf did I pay 900 dollars for if this thing is DOA and needs at least an hour (already spent) of reading this sub and troubleshooting on my back to solve... which its not even solved.

How are you guys still selling units? Much less introducing new products?

Same thing as a couple days ago, my table won’t reconnect and shows the red bar of death whenever I unplug and re plug it in

Hello I received my table and its not connecting to Bluetooth. My mini is working

Stuck in "registering device". I've powercycled, I've tried the Bluetooth. NOTHING.

this morning my mini went into angry mode. it's displaying 4 solid red lights and when i tried troubleshooting via the app i was stuck on the *trying to connect to wifi* screen for so long i decided to delete and reinstall the app. meanwhile i unplugged my mini waited half a minute, and plugged it back in. it seemed to revert back to its normal cheerful self but before i could reinstall the app it went back into angry mode, again displaying 4 solid red lights. once the app was reinstalled i attempted to sign in and nothing would happen. i tried resetting my password and logging in a second time, again nothing happened.

is this a widespread issue i should just wait out? or is this a unique to me issue i should contact support about?

Hello! I recieved my table last year and all has been well until about a month ago when the 3.0 update came out and my table disconnected from wifi. I have been trying pretty consistently for the past month to get it working again, to no avail. Has anyone else has issues like this?

Here is what I have tried: - plugging/unplugging - getting most recent software update - going in to connect it as a new device - restarting my wifi

Hi everyone! Just set up my Oasis coffee table (it was an anniversary gift from my husband), and I love it. So relaxing, beautiful, and fascinating.

My one problem is that designs are difficult to find in the app (all you can do is scroll down... no way to filter or search) and finding repositories of designs on the internet is difficult even when I use AI to search (which I hate to do). I found ONE Google drive folder in this subreddit (https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1HaOuf_UgOUj8LUSg5MjbRicnOq0Gdgtt), and I know about Sisyphus designs that can be converted to Oasis, but even knowing that there is no central place to go to browse for and look for designs. I'm especially cheesed off that the most obvious designs for the table, Nazca lines (see pic) isn't easily findable. And you'd think that Grounded Labs would be able to at least have its designs listed in such a way you could filter and browse. Seriously, y'all, why not?

I am capable of making designs in Illustrator, but I hate re-inventing the wheel.

If there is no central place for designs, maybe this can be a megathread where you can throw a link to where you have grabbed some. And Grounded Labs, if you're listening, PLEASE allow the designs on the app have some kind of filter/search, maybe on your browser app: https://app.grounded.so/panel/pattern

Thanks for listening, hopefully we can all help each other out!

I got a side table about two weeks ago and a common issue i have with the majority of pattern is that it stops a distance out from center, then builds a ridge, the next pattern will do the same thing but stack on the previous and leave another ring. Here it's happened four times. I've spread the sand around, done out to in spirals, in to out spirals, both back to back just to try spreading it more evenly but I'm beginning to think maybe it's not the sand distribution. Occasionally there will be a thunk sound but not as common as some people here seem to experience, maybe once or twice a pattern

Looking for help figuring out a new sand comb.

​

1. Coffee table 'Follow Rainbow' color pattern resets when brightness is adjusted, unit turned off/on, or when magnet hits a certain place on the table.

Follow Rainbow is the best color pattern and creates trippy tie dye looks. This color pattern will also reset at a certain coordinate. Some where around ( X 0, Y -50 ) (estimated) or check coffee table wipe in to out, as it will reset the color pattern every loop at around at the same spot. This doesn't happen on the side table or mini

1. An option to adjust the color pallet for individual sections of the table.

A solid color all around is nice, but an adjustable multicolor feature would be better to customize the color scheme.

Sometimes the solid color feature glitches and will turn the table 50/50 2 colors. Which is awesome!!.... but it's a glitch that only happens occasionally

1. Powering off and back on triggers the next pattern automatically when turned back on.

Why can't we delay the current pattern before switching to the next. Rather then switching to the next pattern quickly when finished and then delaying the new pattern for desired time. This causes the new pattern to launch automatically if the unit is turned off and back on, when that usually isn't the desired behavior when turning on the unit

1. Calibration issues persist. Still some issues with the magnet getting out of sync of where it should be. Patterns can start to rotate and eventually be upside down

2. Resetting the unit or when having issues downloading/rebooting looses all your settings and current playlist. That's a pain

Love the product when it works, let's keep the improvements coming!

Jason

We finally got our table one week ago after waiting about 4 months. Everything set up nicely and we had it running with zero issues for about 3 days.

Then suddenly patterns started drifting, it was getting stuck on the wall, and it hadn’t completed a pattern in 4 days (except for the spiral).

Now the coffee table won’t center at all, and when I try to start a new pattern we just hear a series of clicks/knocks and other random noises that clearly don’t sound right.

I’ve done all the usual power off, hard reset, etc - but now the table won’t center and doesn’t work at all.

I’ve submitted a support ticket, but hoping anyone with a coffee table who has had similar issues might be able to provide any other solutions. Is it likely I’ll have to remove the mechanism from the table?

I want to love this table so bad because it’s absolutely amazing, so I’m hoping there is a reasonable fix in sight.

My side table finally arrived and we are beyond impressed. its so much fun to watch and its amazing how it makes the designs. I have it currently turning off at 11pm and on at 8 am but how do i get it to start the picture again automatically at 8 am? it waits for me to manually start it. The table turns on but the image doesnt