Support

Something not behaving? Start here. If the answer is not on this page, write to [email protected] and a real person will read it. We are a small operation in Utah, not a ticket queue, and nobody here is going to ask you to try turning it off and on again unless we genuinely mean it.

Setting it up for the first time

The whole procedure lives on one page: griftmeter.com/start. Three minutes, one download, no account. If you have not been through that yet, go there first, because most of what follows assumes you have.

The dial is completely dark

Before anything else, check the cable. The dial ships with a USB-A to
USB-C cable and it needs one: it has no USB-C power negotiation, so a
USB-C to USB-C cable will not power it at all. That is the
single most common reason a new dial appears dead on arrival.

• Only USB-C ports on your machine? Any powered A-to-C adapter, hub or
  phone charger works. It runs on ordinary 5 V USB and draws very little, well inside what any port, hub or phone charger provides.
• Lights up but nothing finds it? That is a data problem, not a power one.
  Plenty of cables carry power and nothing else. Swap the cable before you
  suspect anything else.

The dial is stuck on the activation screen

That screen means the dial is powered, awake, and has not been handed a number yet. It is doing exactly what it should. Work through these in order:

• Is The Mule running? It opens its own page at localhost:7777. If that page does not load, The Mule is not running, and the dial has nothing to listen to.
• Has a provider been connected? The Mule cannot report usage it has not been given access to. Its page walks you through signing in to the provider you actually use.
• Give it thirty seconds. The first reading takes a moment to arrive. The activation screen clears itself the instant a real number lands.

The dial is not bricked. It is waiting, which is the one thing it is genuinely good at.

The Mule cannot see the dial

• Try the cable, not just the port. A surprising number of USB-C cables carry power and nothing else. If the dial lights up but nothing finds it, that is very often the cable, and swapping it costs you nothing to test.
• Check The Mule’s device panel. Its page lists what it can see. If the dial is absent there, the problem is between the dial and the computer, not in your provider settings.
• On Linux, check permissions. Your user may need to be in the dialout group before it is allowed to open a serial port. Log out and back in after adding yourself, because group membership does not apply to a session already running.

Wi-Fi will not connect

The dial works perfectly well on the cable alone, so this is optional. If you want it wireless:

• 2.4 GHz only. The radio in the dial cannot see a 5 GHz network. If your router publishes both under one name, the dial will usually still find its way, but a separate 2.4 GHz network is the reliable answer.
• Check the antenna is fitted. If the dial reports a network it cannot then join, and the password is definitely right, look at the antenna before you look at anything else. We have lost an afternoon to this ourselves.
• Save the network first. The test button checks the network the dial has been given, so give it one before asking it to test.

The number looks wrong

The dial reports what your provider reports. If the two disagree, the provider is the one holding the ledger, and we would rather show you their number than a prettier one we made up. Two things worth knowing:

• Grayed out means stale. If your computer sleeps or The Mule stops, the dial dims and tells you how old the reading is. It will not show you a confident number it cannot stand behind.
• It counts the account, not the window. Every session, agent, and editor spending from the same account lands in the same total. The dial is already the sum.

Does it work with what I use?

The Compatibility page is the honest list: what works today, what is planned, and what happens when a provider changes something upstream without telling anybody. It is kept current, and it is deliberately not optimistic.

Orders, shipping, and returns

Delivery times, what shipping costs, and how to send something back are all on Shipping & Returns. Short version: returns are open for 30 days, and if we sent you the wrong thing or it arrived broken, that one is on us.

Still stuck

Email [email protected]. Tell us what the dial is showing, what The Mule’s page says, and which provider you are trying to read. Those three things solve most of it in one reply.