I have had my HD Foscam FI 9818 W working for a few months now without any problems, alongside my other Foscam SD camera. Now, only on the HD camera, without changing anything, nearly every day i have a problem getting a picture from the camera, i just have the annoying ‘trying to get image from camera’. After toggling the power a few times, it comes back, only to have the same problem the next day. The other camera works fine.
I think this is down to how the camera is connected, the camera giving me problems is connected via wifi, the one working fine via ethernet cable. When the camera is ‘down’ i cannot access it at all, not even with the app or over the internet, so it must be a wifi connectivity problem. Strange though as it has worked for a long time, and i have even changed the antenna on it for a high gain one, and an access point is not far away. I have also tested wifi signal strength with my iphone at the location, and signal is fine.
So technically not really a problem for this board as it is not a vera problem as it looks at the moment.
Still, if anybody has an idea of what do do i would appreciate it
Did you recently update the camera firmware when you had this problem?
I did a FW update on my FI8910W to version 11.37.2.54 several weeks back and since that time I have had the problem you describe… unable to get a picture. I got on site with it a week later, rebooted it and it was fine. I decided to put a zwave switch on the camera power so I could power cycle the camera remotely. This works ok but it is very annoying as I have to reboot every day or so. It was running flawlessly for almost a year until I messed with it. It will be a week or two before I can get on site again and try to debug it, but I might try a hardwired connection to see it that fixes it.
Rich
I have done exactly that, put the camera on a zwave on/off switch, so i can remotely reboot it. That worked, but things got progressivly worse, i had to reboot once a day. So i finally got a powerline adapter, so the camera is sort of hardwired now (via powerline), and have not had any problems since. Still very annoying though, it should work via wifi without daily reboots…
Foscam’s wifi on their cameras are pretty shady. I turn it off and hard wire them in for better performance.
- Garrett
I also hardwired all in my Foscam’s, then clones are actually better on wifi.
If you need to hardwire one that is in a location that is hard to, get a cheap router that supports DDWRT, OpenWRT or Tomota and just bridge it. I do that for a HD Cam and Roku, and it made the cam and Roku usable when before you had to reboot them every hour.
Another trick you might try with the wireless connection is to use the Ping Sensor plugin to ping your wireless cameras at least once every 5 min.
I was having the same problem with a wireless connection to my VistCam PTs (basically a foscam camera). I found that requesting a photo archive every 5 minutes kept the camera connection alive. 10 minutes or longer did not. While trying to help me diagnose the problem, technical support was using the Ping Sensor plugin to monitor the camera connection and we discovered that just pinging the camera every 5 min also kept the connection active. Since that, my 4 wireless cameras have been pretty reliable, though not perfect.
@jsnsmyth
Thats interesting. So you set the poll period to 300 secs and device timeout to 0 ? And that keeps it going ? I will have to try that
I had similar problem then changed them to “reservation DHCP” in my router and they seemed to get better.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Ping sensor is a good idea