A screen is blank or showing old information

How to tell a screen that has lost its connection from one that is doing exactly what its schedule and scenes tell it to, and what to check in which order.

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Blank and stale are not the same fault

A blank screen is showing nothing at all — a black panel, or a lit panel with no content on it. A stale screen is showing a complete layout in which the information is old: yesterday's agenda, a photograph that should have changed twenty minutes ago, a forecast from this morning.

The distinction is worth making before you touch anything, because the two have almost nothing in common. Blank is nearly always power, the display itself, or a screen that has not finished starting. Stale is nearly always a screen that has lost its connection and is faithfully redrawing the last thing it was told.

The clock and date widgets read the screen's own clock, so they keep running whatever happens to the network. A screen with the correct time on it has not necessarily heard from Mirra today.

Check these in this order

Each step only matters if the one before it came out clean. Most of the time you will stop at step one or step five.

The order that finds the cause fastest. Stop at the first step that explains what you are seeing.

Read the last-seen time
Open Screens. Every paired screen carries an online or offline pill, and beneath it the date it was paired and the time it was last seen. That one line decides which half of this article you are in.
Look at the panel itself
Only if it is blank. Power, backlight, input source, and whether anything at all is being drawn.
Check the network
Only if the last-seen time is old. The screen has to reach Mirra, and nothing further down this list matters until it can.
Ask the screen what it thinks
Run diagnostics from the screen's own page. It answers with its version, how long it has been running, whether it can reach Mirra, and its recent warnings and errors.
Check the schedule
A screen showing the wrong thing at the wrong time is far more often a schedule rule than a fault.
Check the scene and its widgets
A widget can be sitting in a layout and be deliberately not drawn.

What the last-seen time is telling you

Each screen fetches its whole configuration from Mirra once a minute, and it is that fetch which stamps the last-seen time. A screen counts as online while the stamp is under ninety seconds old — one fetch, plus a little room for a slow one.

So a screen last seen four minutes ago has missed at least three fetches, and a screen last seen at nine this morning stopped talking to Mirra at nine this morning. Nothing you change in the portal reaches it while it is away: a saved layout is pushed to the screen, and a screen that is not there does not receive the push. It collects the change on its own at its next fetch after reconnecting, so there is no need to save anything twice.

Two other readings are worth knowing. A row with no last-seen line at all — just the date it was paired — is a screen that was paired but has never completed a fetch. A recent last-seen time with old content on the wall means the connection is healthy and the fault is in the scene, the widget, or the source behind it — which is what the last two steps are for.

The Screens page. The pill and the line under it are the whole first diagnosis.

A panel showing nothing

Mirra draws nothing at all while it is starting, so a black panel for a few seconds after a reboot is ordinary.
If it cannot reach Mirra at start-up it reloads itself after five seconds. A panel that goes black, flickers, and goes black again is a panel with no route to Mirra rather than a broken display.
If it is showing a six-character pairing code, it has lost its pairing rather than its connection. Pair it again from Screens, using the code on the wall.
Check the display's own input and power before anything else. A television that has switched to a different HDMI input looks identical to a screen that has crashed.

On a self-hosted install, changing JWT_SECRET signs everyone out and unpairs every screen — all of them come back showing a pairing code. It is the one configuration value that cannot be rotated quietly.

The connection, and how it recovers on its own

Two connections matter. The screen fetches its configuration over HTTPS once a minute, and it holds an open connection to Mirra so that a change you save arrives at once rather than on the next fetch.

If that open connection drops, the screen reopens it by itself, waiting a little longer after each failure up to a maximum of thirty seconds between attempts. A screen therefore comes back on its own within about half a minute of the network returning. Rebooting it is rarely the fix, and it throws away the log that would have said what went wrong.

Home Assistant, WLED and cameras are the exception. Those live on your own network and are reached by the screen directly rather than through Mirra, so a screen that can see Mirra but not your Home Assistant will draw everything else and leave the home widgets empty.

Asking the screen what it can see

Diagnostics is a live question, not a stored report: Mirra asks the screen and waits for it to answer. Two of the possible answers are not reports at all.

"That screen is not connected, so it cannot be asked." means the screen is not holding a connection, which should agree with an old last-seen time. "The screen didn't answer in time." means it is connected but did not reply within twenty seconds — usually a screen that is wedged rather than merely busy, and Reload screen is the next thing to try.

Open Screens and click the screen
You want the screen's own page, not the scene editor's toolbar.
Find the Screen commands panel
It sits in the column down the right-hand side.
Press Run diagnostics
The button reads "Asking the screen…" while it waits.
Read the first line
App version, uptime in minutes, and whether Mirra was reachable and how long the round trip took.
Read the log beneath it
The last forty warnings and errors, oldest first. "No warnings or errors logged." is a real answer and a good one.

Identify screen: Puts the screen's name across the display for five seconds. The way to tell which of four identical panels you are editing.
Reload screen: Restarts the screen app, as a browser refresh would. It keeps the pairing, and it clears any scene being held by Show on screen now.
Run diagnostics: Asks the screen for its version, uptime, whether it can reach Mirra, and its recent warnings and errors. It also fills in the What this screen can do line beside it.
Sign in to a calendar on this screen: Starts a Microsoft sign-in for this screen and shows a code to type on a phone. It shares the panel but has nothing to do with blank screens.

Delete screen lives further down, in the Danger zone. It returns the display to a pairing code and takes the screen with it — its settings, its schedule rules and its list of scenes — and a scene made for that screen and never shared can afterwards be put on no screen at all. It is never a way to restart anything. Reload screen is.

When the schedule is the answer

Schedule rules are start times only. A rule says "this scene, from 07:00, on these days", and that scene runs until another rule starts. There is no end time to get wrong and no gap in the day that nothing covers.

If no rule has started yet today, Mirra looks back through the previous days — up to a week — for the last rule that did start, and shows that scene. A screen with a single rule set for Mondays therefore keeps showing the Monday scene all week. If it finds nothing in that week it falls back to the screen's default scene, the one marked with a star.

Rules are worked out on the screen's own clock rather than on Mirra's. That is deliberate, because the schedule should follow the wall the screen is on — but it means a screen whose operating system has the wrong time or time zone changes scene at the wrong hour, and the portal looks entirely correct while it does.

A rule pointing at a scene that has since been taken off this screen is skipped, and the rule before it wins instead.
Rules belong to the screen, not to the scene. Two screens can run the same scene on completely different schedules.
A day with no rule at all is not a blank day — it inherits whatever was running when the previous rule started.

When the scene is the answer

Show on screen now, in the scene actions menu, sends a screen to one scene and holds it there. It outranks the schedule completely, and it stays until somebody chooses Stop showing or the screen reloads. It is the usual explanation for a screen that has been stuck on one layout since the last time anybody was editing it.

Inside a scene, each widget has its own When to show window: From and Until, the days it runs on, and whether somebody has to be in front of the screen. A widget outside its window is not drawn at all — so a scene can look half empty and be doing exactly what it was set up to do.

Only when set to "Somebody is in front of the screen" needs that screen's camera. Until the camera is switched on, the widget always shows.
Leaving From and Until blank means all day. A window may run past midnight.
Layout changes reach a screen when you press Save & push, not as you draw them.
A live broadcast covers the whole screen and has no dismiss control on the screen itself. End it with End broadcast, from Broadcast.

If none of that explains it

Raise a ticket, and put these in it. A report with them can usually be diagnosed on first read; without them the first reply is a request for them.

Which screen, by the name it has on the Screens page.
Roughly when it started — a date and a time, not "recently". The logs are timestamped, so a time narrows the search enormously.
What you expected and what happened instead, one sentence each.
Whether it is one screen or all of them, one widget or the whole layout.
A photograph of the screen showing the problem.
The first line of the diagnostics output, if the screen answered at all.

Pairing a screenHow a display joins your household: the six-character code it shows, what to type into Mirra, what pairing creates, and what happens when you unpair.
Screen settingsEvery setting on a screen's own page that belongs to the screen rather than to a scene — its shape, which way up it is, its camera and gestures, the commands you can send it, and unpairing.
The schedulerSchedule rules say which scene a screen shows from a given time on given days, and the Scheduler draws every screen's day as a timeline you can drag scenes onto.
The scene editorThe scene editor is where you arrange a screen's widgets on a twelve-column grid, watch the real widgets render behind them, and push the result to the wall.
Getting help and raising a ticketHow to raise a support ticket inside Mirra, what to put in it so it can be answered on the first read, where the support documents live, and how to suggest something for the roadmap.