Why does my Chipper card reader keep falling asleep?

Retail & Point of Sale

Topic summary

Chipper card readers appear to “fall asleep,” disrupting checkout, especially at events; merchants are resorting to manual card entry, worried about higher fees and lost sales.

Support clarifies this is expected behavior: Chipper has no sleep mode but enters standby after 30 seconds of inactivity. It remains connected and should resume when you press and release the power button. Holding the power button 4+ seconds resets Bluetooth pairing, requiring re-pairing and causing delays.

Merchants report the issue feels new since a POS layout update and note replacement readers are out of stock due to supply chain issues. One user asked to revert to the old layout.

There is no setting to disable standby. Support logged a feature request to adjust this behavior but cannot guarantee changes. Reverting to POS Classic isn’t possible; the platform has moved to the All-New POS (ANPOS) with POS Pro for advanced retail features. POS = Point of Sale.

Status: No fix or workaround beyond the wake procedure; issue remains open.

Summarized with AI on January 13. AI used: gpt-5.
2

Hey @Polkadog_Bill !

This is a great question. The inactivity mode is expected behavior, and there’s no setting available to change this at this time. For some context, the chipper does not have a sleep mode compared to our other readers. After 30 seconds of inactivity, it goes into standby mode. The reader stays connected to your iOS device while in standby mode and automatically exits standby mode when you resume activity. Are you having an issue with the standby mode starting up quickly for you? In order to resume activity, you need to press and release the power button to use the card reader again. If you press and hold the power button for 4 seconds or more, then the reader resets any Bluetooth pairing that it had, and you need to pair the card reader with the devices again. This information can be found in our help doc here at this link.

With the above-mentioned, I would be more than happy to add this as a feature request with our development teams for you. While I cannot guarantee a change will be made, this feedback is important and definitely worth noting with them. Let me know!

Aside from that, how is business going for you? I am here to help not just with only technical queries but also the growth aspects of your business, so if there is anything you need at all, just shout! Have a lovely day.