Quick answers to the things people most often hit with the Cyber Ægg. If none of these help, file a bug (see the bottom of the page).
General
The badge won’t wake / the display stays blank.
Plug in USB-C. If the LED never blinks, hold Execute while plugging in and re-flash the firmware with dfu-util — see Getting started → Firmware update.
A fresh flash (or factory reset) shows the factory test, then a “ready to ship” screen — and hangs there. By design. After an all-pass self-test the badge stamps its pass flag, draws the ship screen and halts (green LED pulsing). Power-cycle once more; the second boot skips the test and starts the app.
“Battery voltage critical” screen at boot, the badge goes no further. The cell measured below 3.0 V at power-on, so the firmware halts to protect it. Charging is hardware-controlled and continues anyway — leave USB plugged in for a while, then power-cycle manually (the badge does not reboot itself off this screen).
The clock keeps resetting on every reboot. Expected — there is no battery-backed RTC. Pair over Bluetooth with the MeshCore app once per boot, or wait until you are near a synced mesh repeater. Note that on-air time is only accepted from a trusted source — a signature-verified repeater / companion advert or a channel you hold the key for. A crowd of other badges won’t set your clock; a phone pairing always will.
Bluetooth isn’t visible / I can’t pair.
Two things to check: USB is plugged in (Bluetooth is disabled whenever USB is connected — unplug), or Bluetooth was switched off in Main → Settings → Bluetooth (the toggle persists across reboots; set it back to BLE: ON).
My alarm never fired.
The clock hasn’t been set yet this boot — alarms only fire once the time is known. If the clock is set, check the alarm’s Days field — None never fires, and a Weekdays / Weekends / Custom mask only fires on matching days (the header bell shows for any enabled alarm regardless of its day mask).
No mesh peers show up. Walk around — LoRa range varies with terrain and antenna orientation. Also check your LoRa preset under Main → Settings → LoRa Radio; it must match the rest of the local mesh. See Mesh.
I reformatted the badge’s USB drive and everything is gone.
Don’t reformat. The badge only understands its own FAT12 layout; if boot finds anything else (exFAT, NTFS, odd sector sizes) it silently re-formats the whole partition — wiping every file. To clear files, delete them normally instead. If it already happened: copy your .PCX / .ICS / .CFG files back on and reboot.
The charge bolt disappeared while USB is still plugged in. Charging is complete — the bolt returns by itself if the cell drains. Also, the battery icon can lag up to a minute behind reality; it is only re-sampled every 60 seconds.
Display (e-paper)
Red only shows up sometimes — e.g. after switching screens. Working as designed. Staying on one screen uses fast black/white refreshes that don’t repaint the red plane; red repaints on a full refresh (a screen switch, or periodically). It isn’t disabled — it just refreshes less often than black/white.
No red at all / washed-out screen after adding a custom LUT.
Your LUT.CFG is a fast waveform that skips red. Delete LUT.CFG from the badge’s USB drive, or hold Fire (joystick press) while booting to force the built-in tri-colour waveform for that boot. See Hardware → Display.
Blinking white LED / won’t finish booting after dropping a LUT.CFG.
A bad or wrong-panel LUT.CFG is rejected automatically, but if the screen is unreadable, hold Fire while booting to force the safe built-in waveform, then delete or fix the file.
The badge boots fine but ignores my LUT.CFG.
Rejection is silent. Common causes: wrong variant letter for your panel, the wrong key copied from the calibration tool (it wants the flat band_lut hex field, not stage_luts), a file over ~2.8 KB (trim comments and unneeded band overrides), or bad hex length (each LUT value must be exactly 214 hex characters). Holding Fire at boot also forces the built-in waveform for that boot. Details in the firmware’s LUT.md.
Mesh / Bluetooth
The MeshCore app says “connected” but nothing works — can’t set the clock, no contacts, messages won’t send. Stale pairing. The phone forgot the bond (you removed it in Bluetooth settings, or switched phones) but the badge still has it, so every command is rejected as unauthenticated. Fix: Main → Settings → Bluetooth → Clear pairings (wipes all bonds and reboots the badge), then pair fresh. The badge keeps at most 4 bonds — pairing a fifth phone silently doesn’t stick.
The Channel screen shows “BLE client connected” and the buttons are dead. By design: while the phone app is connected the on-badge channel browser locks (only Left / Right / Cancel work). Close or disconnect the app and the screen unlocks immediately.
My PMs and the peers I’d heard are gone after a reboot. The PM inbox and the recently-heard list live in RAM only. Saved contacts persist — when you meet someone you want to message later, open their entry and save them before powering off.
NFC
My vanity URL / vCard doesn’t stick.
Write it with an NFC-writer app as a normal URL/URI, vCard or Wi-Fi record — anything you write (except a token:) becomes your broadcast profile and persists across reboots. See NFC & tokens → Set your own broadcast data.
A token I received disappeared / a URL I tapped reverted.
A token: write is intentionally transient — it lands on the Tokens screen (kept until reboot) and the broadcast reverts to your own profile after about 10 seconds. A pushed token can’t overwrite your profile.
A station tap did nothing — no toast, pet unaffected.
Station commands only apply while you have an active game: pick a pet first (the egg countdown already counts), or start a new egg if your pet has left. Also: station commands come through the signed BadgeCtl reader — writing the phrase (e.g. more food) as a plain text record with a generic NFC app doesn’t feed your pet; it just becomes your broadcast profile, and your badge now proudly hands out “more food” to every phone that taps it. Write a new URL / vCard to fix that.
Game / BornPets
The pet area shows “No sprites on flash”.
The boot scan found zero .PCX files — typical after a factory reset, a drive reformat, or a fresh flash without the asset set. Copy the sprite .PCX files back onto the CYBR<hex> drive and reboot.
A sprite I made shows wrong colours / doesn’t show at all. The badge needs a very specific PCX flavour: 2 bits-per-pixel, single plane, RLE, with the fixed palette order 0 = black, 1 = red, 2 = white, 3 = transparent (the file’s own palette is ignored). A normal 256-colour or 24-bit export is silently skipped. The Pet Maker and the firmware’s asset tool get all of this right.
BORNPETS.CFG / a mode change seems to have no effect.
Both apply at boot only — eject the drive properly (so the file is flushed) and power-cycle. No * after the pet name = no override was applied. See Games.
Where to file bugs
Found something broken? Open an issue on the firmware repository: