Fault Tolerant - Remove location

[EJ007]

These relate to high reliability operation at a remote location:

1.  There should be a way to see the base station even if all of the cameras are dead (battery wise).  As is, best I can tell, the basestation reports offline, even though it may be able to connect to the internet.  The cameras position would then show as not responding, but you'd know the basestation hadn't lost internet connection.

2.  It doesn't seem that the basestation will try to reconnect frequently to the internet.  I may be wrong, but does it try N times then stop?  The basestation should continually try to reconnect to the internet (and its cameras), so long as it is powered.

3.  I would think that the basestation could check in every say 5-10 mins with a simple PING/ACK type arrangment, and if this heartbeat stopped, then a notification would be posted by the app that the unit connectivity is lost.  When connectivity returned, another notification would be posted by the app that the basestation is connected again.  This would help immensely in trouble shooting what is going on when the station is remote and keep the owner aware of status.  I would think many poeple would want this, whether remote, or they are at work that day.

[JamesC]

EJ007,

What is the LED behavior on your base station? The batteries in your cameras being charged does not have any impact on the state of the base station. If your base station is showing offline in the mobile app, it could be due to loss of internet connection or another issue causing a problem.

JamesC

[EJ007]

Hi James.  Thanks for getting back.  In response:

I can't see the base station lights because the base unit is in a remote location I won't visit for another few weeks.  I use your system to monitor the place which is mostly unoccupied.  

I recognize that the batteries in the cameras won't impact the base station, but how do you troubleshoot and differentiate in the app between cameras lost contact or their batteries are dead, and the basestation offline due to internet connection or power loss?  When I look in the app under the "Devices" tab for each camera position when the system goes down, I see:  "This Arlo device is offline.  Please make sure it is connected to the internet."  There are three cameras each on two seperate base stations.  All 6 cameras show this.  Now its possible (but not likely) that the batteries are dead on all of them because its been a while since I've been out there, but more likely the internet is down.  I know I have power because my alarm system does not report a power fail.  However, it would be most excellent if the base station had its own status window vs. trying to impute the status of the base station through each of it's camera statuses under the Devices tab. 

In summary, I'm making two suggestions for the system that I think other users would naturally want also when they're out of town or away from their monitored properties:

A.  Add base station windows (just like the cameras have) under the Devices tab, just as you've provided in other parts of the app where the cameras are shown arranged under each of their respective base stations.  With such a window, you could get a simple "I'm alive" type status, or connection lost status.  This would be seperate from the cameras, however I recognized that when the base station was down, so would its cameras be.  However, if the base station was alive, you'd see cameras active, but if nay of them lost power or connection, under their devices box you could report them as offline.  Given the system knows when camera battery is low, when they disconnect a time after the battery low signal, it would be logical to post:  "Battery Dead" in the camera box.  This would be most imformative for the user.

B.  A PING/ACK arrangement every few minutes so that the system could post a notification  when connection was lost, and then ok later when it was regained.  The base station would attempt to reconnect forever when connection was lost (maybe this is how it works today).   With this, a user could see if they have a finicky connection (because they'd see a lot of connection breaks and then reconnects), or know the moment their system was down.

You have a real nice system here, clearly its growing in popularity, and its very useful for remote monitoring, but I would suggest it needs a bit more like the above to keep the user really informed about a few things related to remove operation.

Thanks for listening.