Arlo|Smart Home Security|Wireless HD Security Cameras
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Alerting Mechanism for Base Station / Camera Offline

Our installation will be very remote beach house. There is a need for mains failure detection in case intruder has deliberately switched of the power. This would be a nice sofware update feature.

Comments
ChrisSTL
Fledgling

We have only had everything setup 2 weeks and this is already my number 1 issue.   We need something here, or shame on me for buying 4 cameras to start with. 

eddyj
Guide

Come on, it has not even been 5 years since this thread started. Give them a chance to make the changes!

 

Where is the sarcasm font when you need it?

 

 

Perian
Follower

I just bought an Arlo Q Plus and after the setup I wondered why there was no option for a notification when the camera is unintentionally disconnected. That is a fundamental security hole which needs to be fixed ASAP.

Even as a hobby programmer I am sure that this only needs a few lines of code to be fixed.

eddyj
Guide

I do software for a living, and it is a lot harder than that. Sending an email may be a few lines, but the infrastructure around doing that would be much, much more complex.

 

Having said that, this should have been implemented in the first place, since these are security cameras. And 5 years later with nothing to show for it is completely ridiculous.

AxJu
Follower

Hi folks,

 

I´m in the IT business as well. To implement this option is very simple. Arlo is supervising my equipment continously to trigger a recording of events and pushmail is in place as well. So it's not a matter of efforts to realise this option. They simply don't want to. Maybe the whole Arlo infrastructure is so shaky that they are afraid to generate too many alerts.

 

By the way: does anybody at Arlo cares about this thread?

 

Axel

Doesn't matter if this is easy or hard...it has to happen.  I mean come on, I get 97 alerts if the F&#$ing wind blows by the front door, but you can't alert me that the system is NOT WORKING.

 

Not trying to pile on, but return your gear before this company folds.  Its stock has done nothing but tank since the spin off, and if these products are this expensive and not working, I would worry about getting stuck with a door jam.

 

ARLO could of suceeded, but.......

eddyj
Guide

Maybe and maybe not. If the base stations are the ones starting the communications (as I suspect), it is easy for Arlo to respond to these (i.e. they respond when something comes from the base station). But detecting when something does NOT happen is harder. They probably see no difference between the base station being down and the base station just not sending any requests due to a camera being triggered. But they have had plenty of time to figure out how to do this, if they cared. They clearly do not.

Sorry but this really isn’t a difficult feature. The cameras are on an IP network to the base station. Just do a simple ping check or port check from the base to the camera - no response, send a notification. 

want to make it more advanced? When video stops streaming, send a notification - maybe the camera is online but no longer streaming. 

my current scenario is my camera records perfectly well using CVR until there’s a notification then it stops, making the camera useless for about 1-3 seconds. 

I loved Arlo, but have learned to hate it more and more with each missed recording. 

new year, new camera system. Every other system has this basic security feature. 

T9001
Star

It would have been oh so simple if they hadn't forgotten to build it in from the start. Even now, it's still very straightforward. There is a snapshot functionality. The base station could request a new snapshot every hour from each camera. If it doesn't get one, it sends an alert. Battery use would be minimal. It could always be optional. You could even set the frequency of snapshot updates per camera if you had some more critical than others. But what do I know...

eddyj
Guide

I did not mean it was really hard of terribly complex. My responses were to the comment that it was "a few lines of code". It is never that easy.   But the only reason it has not happened is because they do not give a crap about this, nothing more than that.