Pairing is a one-time act that ties the Companion running on your machine to one account on the portal and, through that account, to one active team. The Companion needs the pairing before it does anything — until you finish this, the tray icon sits grey with a small exclamation badge and nothing uploads.
Under the hood it is a device-code flow, the same shape Apple TV uses to log in to a streaming app. The Companion generates a short code, you confirm that code from a logged-in browser, the portal mints credentials, and the daemon picks them up. No password is ever typed into the daemon, and the credential itself never leaves Windows Credential Manager once it lands.
The happy path
Open the system tray, find the Stintsmith mark, and click Pair this device. The Companion mints a short pairing code — something like ABCD-EFGH — and immediately opens your default browser to https://stintsmith.com/companion/pair?code=… with the code in the URL. If you’re already signed in, the page reads Pair this device to <your team> and shows you the device fingerprint the Companion just minted, so you can confirm you are confirming the right rig.
Click Pair to my team. The Companion polls in the background; within a few seconds the tray icon goes solid, and a balloon notification confirms Paired to <team>. Watching for sessions. Close the browser tab. That is the whole flow — the daemon will not ask you anything again unless you reset the pairing or the team owner revokes the device.
If the browser does not open
Some Windows configurations block tray apps from launching the default browser — usually because the default has not been set, or because a guest account doesn’t have a registered handler for https://. In that case the Companion still has the code; the tray menu now shows Copy pairing code and Copy pairing URL. Copy the URL, open a browser on the same machine or on the phone you use the portal from, paste, sign in if asked, and confirm. The Companion will pick up the credentials the same way.
If the tab never confirms
Pairing codes are short-lived — the Companion lets each one live for ten minutes before it rotates. If you opened the tab, made coffee, and came back to a stale error, that’s the cause. Close the tab, click Pair this device in the tray again, and re-do the confirmation against the fresh code.
A few other symptoms map to specific problems:
- The portal asks you to sign in and then dumps you on the home screen. The pairing code did not survive the redirect. Open the tray again and click Pair this device after you are signed in; this time the browser already has your session and the confirmation page loads with the code intact.
- The confirmation page shows “Pairing code not found.” Either the code expired or the Companion ran into a problem reaching the portal at mint time. Open Tray → Open logs folder and look for a line tagged
pairing.mint. If the line is an HTTP error, the daemon could not reach the internet; if there is no line at all, the daemon did not get the click — restart it from the tray and try again. - The browser confirms, but the tray icon stays grey. Your firewall is almost certainly blocking the polling request. Allow
Companion.exeoutbound on 443 and the icon will flip within thirty seconds.
Resetting and re-pairing
If a different driver inherits the rig, or you want to move the Companion to a different team, open Tray → Settings → Reset pairing. The daemon drops the refresh token and HMAC secret out of Credential Manager, flips back to the unpaired state, and the next click on Pair this device starts cleanly. The portal also exposes a Revoke device action under Settings → Companion for the case where you no longer have access to the rig.