Foscam AC Adapter Teardown

I still own a couple of Foscam wireless IP cameras. 

I'm done with that brand in favor of Amcrest (sort of a spinoff of Foscam with far superior design and usability aside from the marginally unusable mobile app), but I believe firmly in using a product up to and beyond its predicted life span if it's able. Up until just weeks ago they were performing satisfactorily, then I stopped receiving motion detection alerts from first one, then the other. Could've been a power surge, though the UPS I have my desktop PC hooked into reported no recent events.

Both had curiously similar symptoms. The older camera, an FI8918W, presented with its ring of infra-red (IR) LEDs all blinking simultaneously, with a red indicator LED in the rear constantly flashing and a faint clicking in time with them. The newer one, an FI9821W, didn't have any IR LED activity, just the flashing indicator LED and clicking.

I happened to have a nonfunctional unit of the latter in my closet at home and decided, after some research on Foscam's forums, to simply try swapping the AC adapter. That worked; the camera came back to life and began happily firing off motion alerts.

It would appear that in addition to various other problems with Foscam cameras, the FI9821W in particular, we can add AC adapter failure to the list. Out of curiosity I took the seemingly defective one and tore it down for inspection.

Foscam FI9821W AC adapter with label indicating specifications.

The top of the circuit board showed no obvious signs of failure; no scorch marks, no bulging or burst electrolytic capacitors (see here for more details), no melted or burnt electronics.

Cover removed to reveal the top of the circuit board and components.

The bottom of the circuit board revealed some clues. Multiple areas show telltale signs of melted solder flux, which could indicate overheating. Given that the camera expects a fairly consistent, specific voltage and current, overheating of the AC adapter components over extended periods could've bumped its output outside the tolerances the camera requires to operate normally.

Bottom of the circuit board. Note areas of solder flux showing evidence of possible overheating.

On the brighter side, replacement Foscam AC adapters are inexpensive and available online. If your Foscam wireless IP camera happens to die suddenly and exhibit some of the signs indicated previously, try swapping out its AC adapter and you might have a quick and easy fix. If you're feeling adventurous, it might be worth it to carefully drill some holes in the AC adapter casing to allow for airflow; in operation the AC adapter is quite warm to the touch.

A better long-term fix might be to invest in an Amcrest camera, given its better web UI usability, night vision, and better HD resolution, at least in the one unit I've had set up for a couple of months now.

One wonders if someone more business-savvy among Foscam's leadership actually wanted to invest time and energy into creating a camera that would actually deliver on features, usability, and quality in the form of Amcrest. So far my experience with it has been far superior to my trials and tribulations with Foscam, but we shall see.

Steam Failed to Start Game (App Already Running)

A few Steam client versions prior to the 4/29/2016 build, I began receiving the following error when attempting to start Garry's Mod (aka GMod):

 

Steam reports it is still running even though I had cleanly exited via GMod's interface:

Following the Steam support site link got me nowhere, and googling revealed this bug has occurred in the past more than once (perhaps Valve needs to do better at regression testing?), with no solutions that jumped out. I did discover though that ending the Steam.exe process tree in Task Manager, and then deleting some cached files in Steam's appcache folder, seems to at least work around the problem. 



 

 
Manually this is a bit of a pain, but there is a way to automate this particular workaround which involves creating a batch file to run GMod instead of using the default shortcut Steam creates for it. Here's how. 

1. Right-click on the desktop shortcut for Garry's Mod, then click Properties.
   
2. Click twice to select the text in the URL box, then hit Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard.
   
   
3. Open a text editor (I like Notepad++) and hit Ctrl-V to paste the URL into it, and then type the word START and a blank space so that it looks like this:

   START steam://rungameid/4000

   
   
4. Above the URL you just pasted, copy and paste the following text:

   TASKKILL /IM "Steam.exe" /T /F

   
   The batch file should now look something like this:
   
   
   
   
5. Save the file with whatever file name (I used gmod) and the extension .BAT (for batch file) on your Desktop or wherever makes sense. Then, you can either click twice to run it directly, or create a shortcut and use that instead.
   
      

 
When the batch file is run, this will tell Windows to first execute TASKKILL (a built-in Windows utility) and tell it to close Steam.exe (/IM "Steam.exe") along with any child processes in its process "tree" (/T) forcibly (/F). After that, it will then start a new process to open Steam and then GMod. It'll be as if you'd gone through the steps described above manually, only without the manual part.

The above can be adapted for most any other Steam game having this problem; you'd simply open that other game's shortcut in step 2 and go from there to create a new batch file for it.