ACTi 5311: Getting Weird?

[PeteCress 0]

I've had an ACTi 5311 down on a New Jersey bay (ExtremeSurfcam.DynDNS.org:8080) for the better part of a year now. It even survived Sandy - although the house it was in didn't do so well.

 

But it has gone offline several times. Each time I've driven down there and fooled around with things based on the assumption that the problem was a bad physical Ethernet connection. One time I wiggled the plugs, another time I replaced the RJ-45 plug and so-forth.

 

Each time, it's come back online and stayed up for weeks, if not months at a time.

 

A few weeks ago, it went down again. Had the owner of the house wiggle and re-plug, but no-go. Owner left town last week and it miraculously came back online yesterday.

 

This time I figured "Damn... that switch has spent two years in the Windsurfing shops bayside shed and it's contacts must be corroded and somehow the signal broke through the corrosion", so I went down and swapped out the POE switch for an almost-new duplicate I had at home.

 

Funny thing: it was online before the swap, but offline after the swap.

 

"Double-damn.... Now I've got to lean out of that second-story window, unbolt the thing, and bring it inside for disassembly...."

 

But just before I was about to do that, I thought "Whyyyyyyy not?"... and rapped the camera a couple times with my finger.

 

Oops!!! It came online immediately.

 

Normally I don't think of electronic stuff responding to field-boot maintainence - but this one has me wondering. In rtetrospect, every time I've gone down there for whatever reason, I also managed to touch the camera - whether to tune the aiming, move it to another mounting location, or whatever.

 

I guess the only thing to do is to wait for it to go offline and then ask the resident to rap on it a couple times and see if the miraculous recovery can be replicated.

 

But meanwhile... would anybody care to speculate?

[buellwinkle 0]

You may want to consider a managed PoE switch, that way you can toggle camera power off/on remotely. I've had cameras stay up for years and I've had them act up and hang every few weeks or months and who knows what it is, the switch, the wire, the camera. What I do, which isn't practical for you is switch cameras from one location to the other to see if the problem moves with the camera or stays with the wire.

[bigglebowski 0]

Normally I don't think of electronic stuff responding to field-boot maintainence - but this one has me wondering.

 

Why not, sounds like a classic case of loose connection regardless of what kind of electronics they all have them. Maybe as simple as the RJ45 connection has a cold solder joint. Any device that has a plugin is prone to that kind of failure, power jack, RF connector, input/outputs etc. Or could be as simple as a loose wire harness.