ASH22-W are defective?

[yggdrasil]

I just hooked up to Blue Iris twoASH22-W. Note it makes no difference between Blue Iris or using its default Android Smart Home app, same issue. Will constantly disconnect with no reason.

The camera will lose packets or disconnect from WiFi every 10 minutes, sometime it loses a few packets, comes back, sometimes it disconnects entirely and then reconnects, other times it completely reboots. Not regularly but unpredictable way, I cannot replicate the exact time.

It just disconnects, and then connects again. I checked my AP settings and the Wireless signal is fine, better than other devices, the disconnection happens from the camera side, and other Amcrest Wi-Fi cameras don't do this, neither does any device on my network. When I go to check the camera, the light is red, as if it's rebooting, sometimes blinking, depends on if it's rebooting or reconnecting. It does this every 10 or so minutes, then it completely loses connection until you reboot the device from the power switch.

Either this has a bad firmware or there are some serious hardware issues. It looks to me like some memory leak or buffer overflow, something in the camera just does not like to be constantly connecting, or maybe overheating, but it does this at night as well. The cameras are new, brand new, just installed, they are doing this from the first hour they are connected.

On Amazon others complained about similar issues while other reviews say it works fine. Some said one batch works fine and another does not because he had them working fine and newer models don't work fine. I hope this is a software issue because Amcrest is still selling them on Amazon. They clearly don't work fine. If this was a hardware issue, they should have pulled them out of Amazon instead of selling the defective batch to customers.

 

[wittaj]

Maybe it is a defective camera or maybe you are hitting the limits of the router.

Disconnect EVERYTHING - every camera, every phone, every streaming device. Have only one of these cameras on the router and nothing else with it in the same room as the router - does the problem still happen?


You won't want to hear this LOL, but Wifi and cameras do not go together.

There are always ways if you don't want to run an ethernet cable.

You need power anyway, so go with a powerline adapter to run the date over your electric lines or use a nano-station.

Maybe you are fine now one day with wifi cams, but one day something will happen. A new device, neighbors microwave, etc.

Cameras connected to Wifi routers (whether wifi or not) are problematic for surveillance cameras because they are always streaming and passing data. And the data demands go up with motion and then you lose signal. A lost packet and it has to resend. It can bring the whole network down if trying to send cameras through a wifi router. At the very least it can slow down your entire system.

Unlike Netflix and other streaming services that buffer a movie, these cameras do not buffer up part of the video, so drop outs are frequent, especially once you start adding distance. You would be amazed how much streaming services buffer - don't believe me, start watching something and unplug your router and watch how much longer you can watch NetFlix before it freezes - mine goes 45 seconds. Now do the same with a camera connected to a router and it is fairly instantaneous (within the latency of the stream itself)...

The same issue applies even with the hard-wired cameras trying to send all this non-buffer video stream through a router. Most consumer grade wifi routers are not designed to pass the constant video stream data of cameras, and since they do not buffer, you get these issues. The consumer routers are just not designed for this kind of traffic, even a GB speed router.

So the more cameras you add, the bigger the potential for issues.

Many people unfortunately think wifi cameras are the answer and they are not. People will say what about Ring and Nest - well that is another whole host of issues that we will not discuss here LOL, but they are not streaming 24/7, only when you pull up the app. And then we see all the people come here after that system failed them because their wifi couldn't keep up when the perp came by. For streaming 24/7 to something like an NVR or Blue Iris, forget about it if you want reliability.


This was a great test that SouthernYankee tried and posted about it here:

I did a WIFI test a while back with multiple 2MP cameras each camera was set to VBR, 15 FPS, 15 Iframe, 3072kbs, h.264. Using a WIFI analyzer I selected the least busy channel (1,6,11) on the 2.4 GHZ band and set up a separate access point. With 3 cameras in direct line of sight of the AP about 25 feet away I was able to maintain a reasonable stable network with only intermittent signal drops from the cameras. Added a 4th camera and the network became totally unstable. Also add a lot of motion to the 3 cameras caused some more network instability. More data more instability.
The cameras are nearly continuously transmitting. So any lost packet causes a retry, which cause more traffic, which causes more lost packets.
WIFI does not have a flow control, or a token to transmit. So your devices transmit any time they want, more devices more collisions.
As a side note, it is very easy to jam a WIFI network. WIFI is fine for watching the bird feed but not for home surveillance and security.
The problem is like standing in a room, with multiple people talking to you at the same time about different subjects. You need to answer each person or they repeat the question.

Test do not guess.

For a 802.11G 2.4 GHZ WIFI network the Theoretical Speed is 54Mbps (6.7MBs) real word speed is nearer to 10-29Mbps (1.25-3.6 MBs) for a single channel

And TonyR recommends this (which is the preferred way IF you want to do wifi)

The only way I'd have wireless cams is the way I have them now: a dedicated 802.11n, 2.4GHz Access Point for 3 cams, nothing else uses that AP. Its assigned channel is at the max separation from another 2.4GHz channel in the house. There is no other house near me for about 300 yards and we're separated by dense foliage and trees.

Those 3 cams are indoor, non-critical pet cams (Amcrest IP2M-841's) streaming to Blue Iris and are adequately reliable for their jobs. They take their turns losing signal/reconnecting usually about every 12 hours or so for about 20 seconds which I would not tolerate for an outdoor surveillance cam pointed at my house and/or property.

But for me, this works in my situation: dedicated AP, non-critical application and periodic, short-term video loss.... if any one of those 3 conditions can't be achieved or tolerated, then I also do not recommend using wireless cams.

 

[yggdrasil]

Yes, I’m aware of that, but I wanted a quick setup, until I could deploy the PoE cable at home, I have never used Wi-Fi cameras in any setup, always PoE. But my home is old (50+ years) and does not have the setup for the cabling, and I don’t want to put it outside the walls in a sloppy way.

So I created my own Wi-Fi network just for the cameras separated from the regular WiFi, by using a separated Ubiquity AP. WiFi cameras don’t work well because people put too many of them and in their shared cheap ISP provided router. I created a separated network just for the cameras, and they are only 5 running, the bandwidth is more than enough. Its also on a Ubiquity Edge router but they are shared on a cheaper linksys cheap which maybe could be the issue now that you mentioned it.

I will install another 5-10 cameras in the future, and they will be PoE. For the simple reason as you stated that the power cable is just as complicated if not more to install properly than PoE. The WiFi models, at least from Amcrest also seem to be cheap in features vs the PoE.

It was painful to set up the Wi-Fi cameras but when I purchased them, I knew exactly where I had a power cable in proximity and I placed them, so the cable would not be visible after splitting them all into a separate injunction box. Extremely hard work and not something I would ever suggest to anyone unless you have a lot of spare time. I did not have a proper PoE switch at home either. I normally used Edge switches for this but since they seem EOL by Ubiquity and I don't like their Unify line, I will probably go with a Mikrotik in the future. This is the only reason I purchased the WiFi cameras, to have something running quickly until I can properly lay out my home network for the cameras.

I will test what you mentioned, I did measure my Wireless network previously and in total the bandwidth so far seems fine within the limits. The cameras that do work don’t seem to drop frames or disconnect at all, running them for months now, streaming to Blue Iris. And if they do, it's so minimal that I don't care. Only this model has the problem because if it was once a day for a few seconds I would be fine, it's every couple of minutes. For security, this is not usable.

I will certainly not buy any further Wi-Fi cameras in the future either unless there is absolutely no other choice. I will test in a few days what you mentioned when I have some spare time to disconnect everything and see if the issues persists. Thanks!

 

[wittaj]

Yeah sounds like you understand and have set it up to minimize issues. That cheap linksys could be the issue.

The simple test though will be interesting.

Based on what you posted, I am leaning towards a "defective" camera. I put it in quotes as it may not truly be defective, rather it is that the camera is trying to call home and since you blocked internet, it wonks out and disconnects.

I seem to recall seeing someone with an issue like that as well here. May have been an Amcrest wifi without the web GUI.