Cameras going offline - revisited

[DrDoogie]

My Arlo base station and two cameras have been up and running for about 3 months as a security system in a remote cabin. Shortly after New Year vacation, both cameras went offline. I checked status the day before (as I always do on a day-to-day basis), both cameras showed full batteries and full wifi-strenght. No warning e-mails either. As I visited my cabin this weekend, it turns out that batteries are flat on both cameras, one operating indoor, and one outdoor. Though operating av very different temps they both died in the same moment........

I suspect a firmware opgrade of the base station is the culprit: Probably were both cameras disconnected, and then later on went into a never-ending session of reconnecting without sucess, leaving my batteries dead. Anyone with the same experience?

Regards

[jguerdat]

The recent update did cause some issues that seemed to be solved by a reboot of the base.  If the cameras were constantly trying to reconnect to a confused base, that could explain the dead batteries.  Hopefully, you restarted the base while you were there to help eliminate that as the source of the issue.

[TomMac]

It is very possible that the sw upgrade caused the camera drop outs... but I don't think so as the major upgrade that was done was done to the browsers/apps and not the devices themselves.

According to my notes the  devices firmware is pretty much the same.... not sure when the latest 1.7.0-4638 came out.( base fw )

That said, and we may have touched before on this... at least i know I;ve mentioned it at least 4x in past. I've had it happen to me.

Were there any power outages? .. It has been noted that power outages can cause the cameras to drop out and then sometimes they don't recconnect. In this situ, the batteries (ed guess ) go dead to the constant pinging back to base. ( I'd use a simple electric clock in a remote location to see it power went out , ie time diff , if nothing else )

Why this happens , no idea. But, I have seen that MOST of the time if the base goes down to power, and comes back up the cameras do too.... but not all the time. It leads to a problem like you had. Also, I'm not sure of the amount of disconnect time that causes this to happen.

For me the fix was a UPS on the base ( and router, but really need it on the base ).  As long as the base has power, the cameras talk to it and never loose contact. When the power returns, 99% of time the router come back from the reboot and all is normal.

How big a UPS... prob guess in the $120 ( no bells whistles ) range for about a 900-1000 va unit which may keep the base running for a few hours at least.

example;

http://www.amazon.com/CyberPower-CP1000AVRLCD-Intelligent-1000VA-Mini-Tower/dp/B000QZ3UG0/ref=sr_1_9...