Smart Soldering Iron doesn't heat up, blinks blue 3x when on.

Three blinking lights always means "error" on the soldering iron. Orange lights (regardless of blinking) always means that the iron thinks the tip temperature is at or above the set temperature (350C by default), and blue (regardless of blinking) means that the iron thinks the tip is below 45C.

The reason that the ring turns orange when the tip is removed is because the thermocouple gives the same voltage reading whether the tip is disconnected or ~600C. The tip being disconnected is also an error state, hence the continued blinking when the tip is removed, that's expected behavior, so we can safely ignore the "orange" part of the error diagnosis.

In your situation, we see a blinking blue light (cold measurement, error state), with the tip plugged in. This could mean that the iron has experienced a freefall event, but given your account of attempts at heating up the tip, that seems unlikely. What is more likely is that the iron senses that the temperature isn't moving fast enough for a given power supply, and it is throwing an error. Because you had an instance where the tip did start to heat up, it's sounds like there is a fault either on the board itself preventing power from getting to the tip, or the heater in the tip has failed. Reach out to support for a replacement and we'll get you soldering again soon.

You first want to plug in the charger into the AC outlet, then plug the FixHub station into the charger. Then you should be able to plug in the iron into the FixHub unit.