Remote fault clearing on Cameras that are offline

[fototx]

After 3 months enjoying a stable system, I had 1 camera go offline last night and remain offline.  It is still unable to reconnect after restarting the basestation several times.  After working with customer care for some time tonight, the end solution was to cycle power on the affected camera.  That is physically opening the battery door to cycle power. 

She also indicated that since the new software update, she has had reports of excessive battery draw resulting in offline.

I see the "solution" to recycle power alot on the boards but, IMO, the camera should be smarter than that.  And customers should not be conditioned to simply "cycle power" as a solution....Like the base station which can be reboot, the camera should also be able to remotely "reboot", "cycle power" etc, to clear faults.   CSR indicates that they have not ability to do this, other than the suggestion to manually pull batteries. Welll.... this is not an acceptable solution for those of us who travel and are not arms length from a manual solution. 

Assuming there is battery power and no catestrophic failure of the device....there must be a way to discover deeper the issue at hand and resolve it by:

1.  Making the camera "discoverable" for troubleshooting/resoltuion when it is connected but reporting "offline".  That is, the ability to see faults / send commands to the camera to resolve common service affecting issues to bring it back online.

2. Making the camera "self-healing" when the device is truely off-line and unreachable through the network.  That is, upon fault, let the camera determine on its own, through some rule-base, to recycle/restart/reboot itself and reconnect to the network to complete service restoration or to faciliate additional trouble shooting (#1).

Shore up "network robustness" first, then pour money into features, IMO.   Service availability must be first and foremost. 

Regards

[JamesC]

For those of you experiencing this issue, how far away from the base station are your cameras? Is this happening to all cameras at the same time?

JamesC

[aimeec67]

JamesC - My camera is about 30 feet away from the base station. When camera is not offline is has a full signal stength. Other camera has not gone offline as of yet. I have only had them installed for a couple of days.

[JamesC]

aimeec67,

Consider swapping locations with the camera that is behaving correctly. This will give you an idea if the issue is following the camera or the location.

JamesC

[Gkc]

Sure that will be easy to do when your 2000 miles away

[rscottg]

Has there been any progress on this issue?  I have 1 camera that has now been offline for 10 days.  Other cameras are fine. I am across the country from these cameras. What can I do remotely?

[jgoldste49]

What can you do remotely?  Worry!!!

[naanaa]

Same here. I'm 3000 miles from my system. I have four Arlo's, one just went off line and I have no idea how to get it back. The batteries were replaced four weeks ago with no excessive use! The previous set of batteries in that camera lasted 5 months. How can I reset this camera remotely? The camera in question is about 25 feet from the base station and if other suggested "fixes" are implemented, it would require finding someone willing to climb a ladder to jiggle the batteries or worse, giving them access to my home to re-sync.  

[Bill_E]

After a power failure knocked my cameras offline (all 4 cameras) I was able to get them back online by remotely rebooting the Home base station through the Arlo app.  It did take a few iterations of this Home base station reboot before all 4 cameras came back online for me...  I hope this helps others with offline remote camera systems.

[Aberger89]

We have the arlo pro baby monitor. On multiple occasions we have woken up to find that the camera disconnected from the wifi network, but there was no way to tell when . I believe an alert sent to phone is imperative, so that parents can rest easy and not worry if while they're asleep the camera will disconnect from the wifi, with no way of knowing until morning

[m_z]

+1

This is also a great warning in case e.g. a burglar cuts the power off.