Please help..not a newbie but can't get FOSCAM IP camera to stay connected AC56U

[nyvram]

UPDATE: SOLVED (see my 5th post in this thread)

Long story short, everything was working like a charm then I had a power outage.

When I say working like a charm, the connection was rock solid over WiFi and I hit the camera all the time and never had even the slightest hiccup.

Then the power went out for 4 hours.

When everything came back up, camera would no longer reliably show up on network (lots of timeouts) and after a few frustrating days, I sent it back to Foscam and bought a new one thinking the WiFi board on the camera was damaged.

But the new one has same problem so I think I've eliminated the camera as the issue.

I was running RMERLIN .45 and I updated to .47. I have *NOT* factory reset the router. I'm using WPA-2 encryption and everything is fairly standard..I'm not doing anything crazy.

Is it possible the router was affected by power outage? I have about 15 other wireless devices; none of which are having any trouble at all..ever.

Its this damn camera. I am pulling my hair out at this point.

Its fine as long as I'm connecting via Ethernet (except the MAC address is different) and when I pull the ethernet cable out..it works great...for a few minutes.

As soon as I unplug it and move it somewhere else..it starts messing up again.

It will connect for maybe 5 seconds..then disappear for a minute..then back for 5 seconds.

SO FRUSTRATING! It won't stay connected long enough to play with the settings.

Its got to be something I did with the router, right? Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I can do at this point? Do i just need to factory reset it and start all over again?

I can tell you any settings you want to know..and the camera shows up in the router UI with 5 bars..very strong signal..so its nothing like that.

Right now I have the camera set to automatically obtain an IP address because until I get this worked out, I don't care about remote access or port forwarding.

one problem at a time...please..help?

eta a couple screenshots (may or may not help)

 

[abescalamis]

Long story short, everything was working like a charm then I had a power outage.

When I say working like a charm, the connection was rock solid over WiFi and I hit the camera all the time and never had even the slightest hiccup.

Then the power went out for 4 hours.

When everything came back up, camera would no longer reliably show up on network (lots of timeouts) and after a few frustrating days, I sent it back to Foscam and bought a new one thinking the WiFi board on the camera was damaged.

But the new one has same problem so I think I've eliminated the camera as the issue.

I was running RMERLIN .45 and I updated to .47. I have *NOT* factory reset the router. I'm using WPA-2 encryption and everything is fairly standard..I'm not doing anything crazy.

Is it possible the router was affected by power outage? I have about 15 other wireless devices; none of which are having any trouble at all..ever.

Its this damn camera. I am pulling my hair out at this point.

Its fine as long as I'm connecting via Ethernet (except the MAC address is different) and when I pull the ethernet cable out..it works great...for a few minutes.

As soon as I unplug it and move it somewhere else..it starts messing up again.

It will connect for maybe 5 seconds..then disappear for a minute..then back for 5 seconds.

SO FRUSTRATING! It won't stay connected long enough to play with the settings.

Its got to be something I did with the router, right? Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I can do at this point? Do i just need to factory reset it and start all over again?

I can tell you any settings you want to know..and the camera shows up in the router UI with 5 bars..very strong signal..so its nothing like that.

Right now I have the camera set to automatically obtain an IP address because until I get this worked out, I don't care about remote access or port forwarding.

one problem at a time...please..help?

eta a couple screenshots (may or may not help)

My friend this is what you have to do:

1) Plug your camera to the router via cable,
2) Access the camera web interface and then go to the network tab on your camera GUI.
3) Go to the wireless settings and connect to the wifi (connect to your wireless and enter your wifi password) and press the save tab.
4) Unplug the Ethernet cable from you camera, do not turn off the camera! leave it for like 5 minutes and then check if it already connected to your router via wifi if it did now you can turn off you camera if you need.

The foscam has a very specific way to set it up, I believe that you have the camera to automatically obtain the IP from the router, that is the reason why the camera couldn't connect to the router after being 4 hours off, the router was assigning a new IP to the camera and the camera didn't like that.

if you don't like this to happen again, see what IP the router assign to the camera and enter it on the IP configuration on the camera GUI.

 

[nyvram]

i changed the router to channel 11 and its a tiny bit more stable..but still goes offline constantly.

is that all due to not giving the camera time to 'rest' after hooking it up to router via ethernet?

this is crazy. it was working perfect a week ago with no WiFi dropouts at all. why would the channel make a difference?

are there some 2.4ghz channels taht don't work with foscams very well?

 

[nyvram]

PS another interesting thing..before the camera showed up in ASUS with a camera icon not a generic PC like its showing up now.

i dont remember doing anything so that the router would recognize it as a camera.

Is it possible the power outage messed with the WiFi connection stability? Is there any way to look that up in the router logs?

 

[mreckhof]

I just went through foscam drops myself and it ended up being interference. I had forgotten to unplug the baby monitor it was replacing.

Hard to think a power outage would change that scenario for you though, but this camera seems very picky to the slightest changes.

Even after removing the primary interference, it wasn't fully stable until I pretty much moved everything I could to 5 Ghz and left the camera nearly alone on 2.4 (and static ip and lowered the main stream bitrate a bit).

If you haven't already, and aren't in a dense wifi area, see if it gets more stable if you only have two wifi devices - the camera on 2.4 and PC on 5 Ghz (or Ethernet). I wonder if when things reattached more things joined 2.4 instead of 5 and changed the usage there.

Just some thoughts. Good luck.

 

[nyvram]

Hard to think a power outage would change that scenario for you though, but this camera seems very picky to the slightest changes.

ok, i haven't factory reset the router yet; but i have it 'kind of' working now.

it seems when the power went out my asus was set to 'auto' for the channel. after coming back up, it was on channel 6, which apparently is not a good channel for the foscams. (go figure...)

so i changed it to channel 1 and got a slightly better connection but it still times out on me.

this is extremely frustrating to say the least. i would just think the cameras cant handle the signal or distance if i hadnt had the one camera working like a charm for over a week without a single timeout.

anyway, i am still not sure if a factory reset won't help but this is unbelievably frustrating.

eta, could it possibly be a neighbor's WiFi signal is causing trouble? Maybe after the power outage their WiFi channel also changed?

:angry:

 

[abescalamis]

ok, i haven't factory reset the router yet; but i have it 'kind of' working now.

it seems when the power went out my asus was set to 'auto' for the channel. after coming back up, it was on channel 6, which apparently is not a good channel for the foscams. (go figure...)

so i changed it to channel 1 and got a slightly better connection but it still times out on me.

this is extremely frustrating to say the least. i would just think the cameras cant handle the signal or distance if i hadnt had the one camera working like a charm for over a week without a single timeout.

anyway, i am still not sure if a factory reset won't help but this is unbelievably frustrating.

eta, could it possibly be a neighbor's WiFi signal is causing trouble? Maybe after the power outage their WiFi channel also changed?

:angry:

You should do a factory reset to both, the router and the camera as mreckhof said this cameras are very picky to the slightest changes, even updates.

As an example, I have to factory reset my camera after every update, if I don't it acts lagy, signal drops etc, etc.

 

[nyvram]

Quick update..to close this thread out:

I "fixed" it by enabling "UpNp" in the CAMERA SETTINGS UI. After enabling that, the connection stabilized and it stopped dropping connectivity every few seconds.

I'm still not sure why..but it seems to work.

On camera
- Unchecked Obtain IP From DHCP
- Set IP to 192.168.1.10, Subnet: 255.255.255.0, Gateway/DNS: 192.168.1.1
- PPPoE OFF
- DDNS OFF
- UpNp ON
- Port: HTTP 8091, HTTPS 44, ONVIF 888

On my router (.48 RMERLIN)
- LAN DHCP Server ON: IP POOL STARTS: 192.168.1.11 (why i'm using 10 for camera), and do NOT have this entry in the "Manually Assigned IP"
- WAN Enable UpNp Yes
- WAN Virtual Server
--> Service Name IPCam
--> Port Range 8091
--> Local IP 192.168.1.10
--> Local Port 8091
--> Protocol BOTH