Has anyone else had issues with the “new” HB3/WiFi connection process? Short story long, I had a lot of problems accessing recordings on the HB and even playing live video. I finally decided to replace the HB HDD with a better quality drive. That really seamed to fix the issue and I was happy for about a week. The I started noticing that some of my cameras were not showing as part of the HB group or didn’t have the “smart” features available. When I tried to reconnect these cameras to the HB it prompted me to update the firmware to “take advantage of these features”, that is when the fun started.
Now it seems that you have to join the camera to the HB first as its default wifi connection and if the signal is not strong enough you can add your wifi network as a backup? Trying to reconnect the camera to your existing wifi fails about 70% of the time and if you are like me some of the cameras are too far away from the HB for a signal at all. Now I am expected to take those cameras down, move them the room with the HB and spend about 1hr per camera trying to reconnect to the wifi? On top of that some cameras just seem to go offline for a while when they have a weak signal but not quite week enough to switch to wifi.
Hi, I don’t have a HomeBase, but that connection type procedure sounds terrible.
If the cameras are not in Wi-Fi range of the HB you’re pretty much limited for a cam mounting location_that’s pretty much the downfall of the HB.
Yeah there is multi- bridge though I believe only a few cameras are capable of using that technology.
this would be for cameras that don’t rely on the HB3 for a Wi-Fi connection only
What if you powered off the HB3 and then try to add your cameras to the your home’s Wi-Fi (since the HB3 is not powered there’s no Wi-Fi signal for it and the app may not ask you to try to connect to it),
Once connected to your home’s Wi-Fi update the cameras firmware.
Then you can power the HB3 backup and attempt to join/connect back to it.
So prior to this update this connection was an either / or type. You can remain connected to the HB or if you put in your wifi it would use wifi. So if you had lets say Indoor Cam E220, thats a wifi only type cam, you could still connect to the HB and use the “advanced” features of the HB like facial recognition over wifi. This update disconnected that connection to the HB (without notification) I found out by accident, the camera was still recording to the HB just the other features weren’t working.
When you try to reconnect to the HB by clicking homebase connection it prompts you to update the camera firmware. That update removes your existing wifi connection and connects the camera to the HB directly. In order to add your wifi back you have to go into the camera settings again, this time relying on the HB connection only, and setting your wifi under the multi-bridge setting. Half of my cameras are out of range of the HB and for the ones that are in range 70% of the time they will not reconnect to the wifi. I can only assume this is because my router is trying to issue the same IP address to the MAC of the camera but the camera wont accept it…?
It gets even better. For the ones that I have successfully set back up I have terrible lag and gaps in the video because the camera is trying to hold on to the HB connecting for too long when the signal gets week or takes forever to switch to wifi. Some of these cameras take forever to “try” and reconnect to wifi only to fail in the end.
The easiest solution might be a mesh network. I have two pan and tilts connected to my WiFi, I wanted them to connect to the homebase but I’ve had the opposite issue as you, I do believe that one has transitioned itself to the homebase, since my deco app currently only shows one on the network but both are online.