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How to Set Up Neat Center(s)

Last updated November 11, 2026

Neat Center is a companion device that extends the capabilities of Neat devices and dynamic framing, enabling remote meeting attendees to enjoy enhanced context and engagement for a more inclusive hybrid meeting experience.

This article offers simple, step-by-step instructions for setting up your Neat Center, whether during the initial installation or after a factory reset.

Contents

Planning your room layout?

Before mounting or pairing Neat Center, we recommend reviewing the Neat Center Room Design Guide (PDF).

This guide covers best practices for positioning one or multiple Neat Centers in different room layouts—especially larger or more complex spaces—to ensure optimal video framing, audio pickup, and meeting equity.

Important note: As of NeatOS 25.4, you can set up two Neat Centers with your front-of-room (FoR) device. As of NeatOS 26.6.0, three Neat Centers are fully supported (no longer beta). Multi-Neat Center setup is only supported on Generation 2 Neat devices (e.g. Neat Bar Gen 2, Neat Bar Pro, Neat Board 50, Neat Board Pro). The instructions in this article apply to the setup of the first, second, and third Neat Center in your setup. For recommended room layouts with three Neat Centers, see Section 8. See Section 2 for any known limitations.

1. Prerequisites

Here are the prerequisites for installing Neat Center: 

  • Neat Center is a companion device in a pre-established Neat Room alongside our main devices. It can be setup with the following devices, provided they are running Neat OS 24.2.0 or later. These devices must already be installed as a Zoom or Microsoft Teams room or Open Apps or BYOD-only before Neat Center is added as a companion device.
    • Neat Board 
    • Neat Board 50
    • Neat Board Pro
    • Neat Bar / Neat Bar 2
    • Neat Bar Pro
  • All devices (i.e. the Neat Center, the main Neat Pad controller and the main Neat room device) must be on the same wired subnet to be able to pair successfully and operate.
  • Neat Center uses two mDNS service strings: _neat._tcp and _neat-oob._tcp
  • Network and Firewall requirements for Neat devices must be met

Note: Neat Bar requires a paired Neat Pad to support Neat Center. Deployments without a Neat Pad are not compatible.

2. Known limitations

Neat Center does not currently support the following features available with other Neat products. These include:

  • Wifi
  • Only one Neat Center can be used for each Gen 1 FoR Neat device (Bar and Board) (as of Neat OS version 25.4)
  • At the time of writing, updating the Neat Center software is not available from ZDM or TAC.

Note: Neat Center now supports:
– custom NTP and proxy servers. For more information, see: Neat devices: Versions 24.5.0 and 24.5.1 Release Notes.
– Static IP configuration and 802.1X authentication (including SCEP) (beta). For more information, see: Neat devices: Versions 26.1.0 Release Notes and Configure a Static IP address.

3. What’s included in the box

Details of what’s in the Neat Center box, what you need and optional extras, can be found on the Neat Center In the Box page.

Note: Ceiling-mounting hardware is only necessary if you intend to mount your Neat Center on the ceiling.

4. Mounting your Neat Center

The Neat Center offers three mounting choices: Freestanding, Fixed-to-table, or Ceiling-mounted. 

Watch the interactive guide Neat Center Mounting Guides for step-by-step instructions tailored to your chosen mounting option.

Important: For the best video and audio performance, we recommend table mounting. If table mounting is not an option it’s important to note that the higher the Neat Center is mounted the more likely you are to experience degraded performance.

Important: For ceiling-mounted setups, we recommend positioning the Neat Center above eye level for seated participants, ensuring an unobstructed view for all participants. Anything above 70″ / 1.8m high is not recommended.

Note that Neat Center is also tripod mount compatible (1/4-20 UNC threads).

5. Powering up your Neat Center

5.1 POE (Power-over-ethernet)

If your network supports Power-Over-Ethernet (PoE), connect your Neat Center directly to an Ethernet port using the supplied Ethernet cable to receive both network and power. 

Important: Neat Center supports IEEE 802.3af Class 0 Mode A and  B.

5.2 Using the POE injector/adapter (optional extra)

If PoE isn’t available, utilize the PoE injector/adapter to power your Neat Center. The PoE injector features two interfaces:

  • a Power interface, indicated by an icon depicting a Pad with a finger, to supply power to the Neat Center;
  • a LAN interface, depicted by a wired LAN icon, to connect the Neat Center to your wired network. See Figure 1.

To power the Neat Center:

  1. Connect it to the PoE injector’s Power interface using an Ethernet cable.
  2. Plug the PoE injector into your power outlet or socket.
  3. Link the PoE injector’s LAN interface to your network port using another Ethernet cable.
Figure 1: POE Icons; LAN interface (left), Power interface (right)
Figure 2: Neat Center Cable Diagram

5.3. Power budget for multiple Neat Centers

If you’re deploying two or three Neat Centers in the same room, make sure your network switch’s PoE power budget can support all of them at once.

  • Each Neat Center draws approximately 11–12W over PoE (IEEE 802.3af Class 0).
  • When planning your switch’s power budget, account for all Neat Centers in the room together, plus any other PoE-powered devices on the same switch — for example a Neat Pad.
  • If your switch’s total PoE budget is exceeded, devices may fail to power on, or may unexpectedly drop power during use. Check your switch’s PoE budget and per-port allocation before deployment, especially in rooms with three Neat Centers plus a front-of-room device and Pad on the same switch.

For general network prerequisites (subnet, mDNS, firewall rules), see Section 1 and Network and Firewall requirements for Neat devices.

6. Connecting Neat Center to the Internet

Once the device is connected to ethernet it will automatically boot up and initiate a software update (if required). The LED ring indicates the progress of the update. The update is finished when the ring is complete and will be ready to pair as soon as the LED begins pulsing.

7. Pairing your Neat Center to your main Neat device

Please watch the interactive guide Neat Center pairing guide to pair Neat Center to the main Neat device. When it is ready to be paired, the LED ring on Neat Center will be pulsating. 

  • On the Neat Pad (or Neat Board) that you wish to pair Neat Center with, go to More > Settings > Device settings, and sign in as admin. Then select the Neat Center with the corresponding serial number.

Note: You can find the serial number on the underside of the packaging or close the connectors on Neat Center.

Figure 3: Neat System settings > Devices > Add Device
  • Your Neat device will begin the paring process which should take a few seconds to complete.
  • A fully illuminated LED ring confirms the successful pairing between Neat Center and your front-of-room Neat Device.
Figure 6: Successfully paired Neat Center

8. Multi-Neat Center setup

As of Neat OS 25.4, multi-Neat Center setups are supported with Generation 2 Front-of-Room devices (i.e., Neat Bar Gen 2, Neat Bar Pro, Neat Board 50, and Neat Board Pro).

To add a second or third Neat Center to your setup, repeat steps 3–7 from this article.

Recommended layouts for three Neat Centers

Three Neat Centers can be arranged in a few different configurations depending on your room shape and how you want to use Neat Focus:

  • Three in a row along a long table, for maximum coverage across the full length of the room.
  • Two on the table, one dedicated to Neat Focus — two Centers cover the table while the third is positioned to spotlight a presenter or focus area.
  • U-shaped table setup, with Centers positioned to cover all three sides of the table.
  • Two dedicated to Neat Focus, one on the table — for rooms where keeping two separate focus areas in view matters more than full-table coverage.

Note: When two or more Neat Centers are paired with your Front-of-Room device, they will appear in the interface as Neat Center 1, Neat Center 2, Neat Center 3 according to the order in which they were connected and paired.

9. Neat Center camera controls and custom configuration

Once your Neat Center(s) are set up, you can choose which cameras to use and adjust their behavior to suit your room layout.

For detailed instructions, see Camera Framing Options for Neat Center.

10. Unpairing and resetting Neat Center

If you want to remove Neat Center(s) from your existing room, either to use in a different setup or to recover it from an error state, you can follow the steps below. 

10.1 Unpairing and resetting a ‘working’ Neat Center

  1. On the Neat Pad/Neat Board, go to Settings > Device settings > select the Neat Center. It will now open the Device Info screen for the selected device. 
  2. Click Unpair. A pop-up box displays (see Figure 7).
  3. Click Unpair in the pop-up box. It will now unpair the Neat Center and restore it to factory settings (out-of-box or OOB state), ready to be paired again (LED will be pulsating when it is ready to be paired).
Figure 7: Pop-up message to Unpair Neat Center from the main Neat Device

10.2 Unpairing and resetting a ‘non-working’ Neat Center

If you have a Neat Center that is currently in an error state, and unpairing and restoring it to factory settings from the main Neat device doesn’t work, you can follow the steps below to recover it: 

  1. On the Neat Pad/Neat Board, go to Settings > Device settings > select the Neat Center. It will now open the Device Info screen for the selected device.
  2. Click Unpair and if you get an error that says Unable to unpair Neat Center, click Try again. 
  3. Neat Pad/Board will next report that the device is no longer connected. It will now ask you to manually reset the device and then tap Forget device. 
Figure 8: Pop-up message when the main Neat device is unable to unpair Neat Center

The factory reset button is located at the bottom of the Neat Center as shown in Figure 9. Press and hold it for at least 5 seconds and release it to reset the device back to its OOB state. Once it has been factory reset, it will be ready for pairing again (the LED will be pulsating when it is ready). 

Figure 9: The factory reset button is located on the underside of the Neat Center

That’s it! You are now ready to start using your new Neat Center!