Linksys IP camera success

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I’ve found that my Trendnet TV-IP100W cameras can"t serve a JPEG page, so they are not compatible with Vera. Both MCV support and Trendnet support helped me sort that out. So now I have four Linksys WVC54GCA cameras up and running in Vera. It’s pretty cool to be able to look at my driveway, gate, front door, etc. on my iPhone.

But of course I have a question: should cameras be set up with a fixed IP (rather than DHCP) so I don’t lose them if my network (Apple Airport) should go down? I don’t think Vera has a way to find them automatically if their address should change or their DHCP lease expires. She certainly didn’t see them via UPnP.

Is a fixed IP the way to go?

2

I’m happy the Linksys WVC54GCA work for you, I added that topic to the WIKI a few months ago when I was starting to setup Vera. With Vera, you can add ANY camera that you can fetch a JPG image from with a URL. I did notice the older Linksys WVC54GC do NOT offer this capability, but using a PC you can use MPlayer to strip out a JPG image from the video stream (asf). You can then store the JPG snapshot on a PC, then run a web server and vera can then “fetch” the image from the PC instead of the camera. This is a good way to add support for cams that may not work with Vera’s URL image fetch

I have about 8 camera’s and Vera can get to them all and fetch images. I would HIGHLY recommend you set each IP camera to a Static LAN IP and different TCP/IP port for viewing. The WVC54GCA also has an issue when on DHCP that causes lockups every 24 hours or so, so it’s best to set a Static IP on these.

3

I can’t make my Linksys WVC54GCA work - it disconnects from network every few minutes, wired or wireless. Linksys support sent me new power supply which didn’t help… Forums show that this is a typical problem for this model, though for some lucky ones it works…

4

Not that I’m completely without problems, but:

How long is your DHCP lease on your wireless router set for? and then: try using a static IP. If that isn’t it, then maybe you’re having a problem I will have in my future. Joy!

My problems now are about Vera slowing down to a crawl and needing to be un-and re-plugged. For the first time since I started this adventure. Ugh.

5

It’s static. I suppose 72.3% of these cameras are simply lemons. Rest are the lucky ones :slight_smile:

6
My problems now are about Vera slowing down to a crawl and needing to be un-and re-plugged. For the first time since I started this adventure. Ugh.

I assume you’re using the Luup beta version. I just did a build which should fix this, assuming the cause of your problem is the same as what we identified. We’re doing the full set of tests now and should release it soon. The link is: http://download.controlmyhouse.net/betafirmware/ftp/wl500gP_Luup-1.0.937.trx if you want to try it out