In my abortive attempt to review the Foscam FI9821, I mentioned the complete inability for the camera to find let alone connect to mine nor any wireless networks in my neighborhood. This precluded my ability (and desire) to review the camera any further.
Now, however, the camera sees and connects successfully to my wireless network.
After my issues with the late Foscam FI9820 with its poor daytime image quality and anemic firmware, I already experienced RMA hell and didn't want to go through it again. Thus, being handy with electronics, I decided to try an off the wall suggestion found in Foscam's support forum.
Note that the following steps may VOID the manufacturer warranty.
1. Power off the FI9821 and disconnect all cables.
2. Remove the rubber feet on the underside of the camera, this should reveal a couple of screws. Remove them. There are also two screws located on the underside beneath one round laser QA label and another beneath a round paper label. Remove the labels and then the screws as well.
3. Carefully remove the bottom of the camera and follow the wire that runs from behind where the antenna screws in to the camera to a metal "post" on the circuitboard, similar to the one depicted here:
4. Remove the connector, then reconnect it, and as you do so wiggle it, just a little bit.
5. Reverse the steps above and reassemble the camera.
6. Connect the power and ethernet cables, and proceed to configure the camera to connect to your wireless network if you haven't already. Be sure to save the settings!
7. From the camera's web interface, on the Wireless Settings screen click the Scan button. Your wireless network should appear similarly as shown below:
8. Unplug the ethernet cable and wait a minute or so, then try browsing to the camera's IP address. With luck, the camera will have switched to wireless mode and you should then be connected wirelessly, at last!
Why does this work?? It could be due to insulation which is sometimes used to coat electronics, such as that used to coat thin wire that's used for coils. Perhaps in the manufacturing process, the post got sprayed with insulation by accident, leading to a poor connection with the antenna wire connector. Wiggling the connector around on the post may've scraped away any insulation, leading to a solid connection.
Regardless, releasing a $150+ camera so hurriedly with a problem like this, one that some simple quality assurance practices could've caught and fixed, is ridiculous. Although again I applaud Foscam for their responsive customer service and providing me with a free upgrade to the newest model of their camera, shame on them for not catching this frustrating little glitch!
I will review the camera in earnest in the near future, now that its wireless connectivity, a core feature in my eyes, is operational at last.
UPDATE: Hard to believe, but a tip on Foscam's support forum from some random user turned out to be more helpful than Foscam.
A user on the forums reported that they got their wireless functional by simply popping open the camera, and then adjusting the wire connected to the camera's antenna.
Lo and behold, upon opening up the camera (and surely voiding its warranty, but no matter at this point as far as I'm concerned) and then removing the wire from its little post, reattaching it, then grinding it around the post back and forth a few times, suddenly the camera is able to detect my wireless network!
Wow.
Foscam should enclose instructions telling their users how to crack the camera open and do what their QA department should've done and ensure the connection between the antenna and their camera is solid.
Or, even better, Foscam should do this testing prior to selling a $150+ camera to its customers!
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I am pleased to be able to review the recently released Foscam FI9821 IP camera.
Perhaps in part due to my rather frank review of their FI9820 model, Foscam has just recently premiered the FI9821, with similar capabilities as the FI9820 but, I hope, fewer outright bugs than the previous model.
To review, the Foscam FI9820 had the following disagreeable problems:
- Poor daylight video quality.
- Inability to connect to a wireless WPA2 network that uses a complex passphrase with any non-alphanumeric characters.
- As reported by Foscam, no further firmware support that might resolve these and any future issues.
I must give credit to Foscam's tech support. Courteous and respectful to the last, even when I threatened to contact my bank to dispute the credit card transactions associated with my purchase of two FI9820 cameras, they fulfilled an RMA request and provided me with a FREE upgrade to two FI9821 cameras at no cost other than for shipping the old cameras to their Houston, Texas facility.
Now, on to the review of Foscam's newest camera.
The cameras each arrived carefully packaged via USPS Priority Mail. My first minor disappointment came in the form of the AC adapter, its cord is still a mere 3 feet in length, less than I'd like.
I plugged in the power and fired up the camera, then assuming it would utilize DHCP to acquire a network address from my home router, I scanned my network using the handy free utility, Advanced IP Scanner, to ascertain its IP address so I could point my browser to it and configure it. No joy, the MAC address of the camera didn't appear to be detected by the software.
I uncharacteristically decided to consult the manual, which instructed me to pop the included CD into my drive and run the IP Camera Tool utility to help detect the camera on my network. Upon doing so, the camera was indeed detected, but strangely its TCP port had been set to 88 at the factory rather than the industry-standard 80 for http traffic.
Okay.
I accessed the camera's interface, and promptly changed the port to the standard port 80. So far, so good.
Next I tried to configure the wireless network settings on the camera. The interface isn't terribly helpful, for one, it seems Foscam expects your wireless network's SSID to be broadcast rather than hidden. I prefer to keep my SSID hidden to minimize the chance some passerby might see it and gain access, but as was the case with the FI9820, this new model wants your SSID to be broadcast.
Despite setting my SSID to be broadcast, this camera seems to NOT want to connect to my wireless network. This as of the most recent 1.1.1.10 firmware update.
I simply cannot review this camera any further until I'm able to connect it to my wireless network. I've contacted Foscam support, hopefully they'll address this issue sooner than later.
When trying to do a disk and partition backup on Acronis True Image Home 2012 build 7133 to an external USB drive, the backup failed repeatedly with a read error.
Upon contacting Acronis support, at first I got a suggestion that the error had been "fixed" in the latest version, and that I should upgrade to the 2013 version of the software. Conveniently, the support tech I'd been corresponding with provided me with an affiliate link to purchase the new version.
It seemed rather odd that a support tech would provide an affiliate link to purchase an upgraded version of the product rather than help with the customer's current version. I decided, instead, to press the issue and fork over $9.99 for a paid support incident. My case then got reassigned to someone who seemed to be more on the ball, and asked me to take some basic troubleshooting steps, including scanning my C: drive, which happens to be an Intel SSD, with the chkdsk utility, revealed so issues whatsoever.
Subsequent back and forth with the support technician proved largely unhelpful until they asked me to try backing up a single file or folder rather than a whole partition. I then tried backing up the My Documents folder, and it failed quickly with an error stating the system couldn't find the path R:\TEMP, which happened to be associated with a RAM drive I'd had set up until recently.
I remembered that in the time between making my last successful backup using Acronis, I'd uninstalled QSoft RAMDisk, a utility which enables you to use a portion of your system memory as a very fast RAM drive. Trying to create a backup with Acronis since the RAM drive had been uninstalled proved fruitless because Acronis seemingly balked at not being able to find the RAM drive registered with Windows any longer.
Serendipitously, the developer of the RAM drive software released an updated build of their software earlier this month, so I decided to reinstall it and give it a try. I installed the software, then set up a RAM drive with the same drive letter as I'd originally used.
Upon reinstalling the RAM drive and rebooting, the backup proceeded successfully.
The moral of the story appears to be, if you happened to have a RAM drive installed on your system at some point prior to having Acronis installed, you'd best make sure the RAM drive is existant so that Acronis won't complain and decide to no longer complete your backups.
For months I'd been having issues with lag and stuttering in the PC version of Battlefield 3. Worse, though, were frequent, seemingly random disconnects.
I'd connect to a server, be able to play for 10 minutes or more, then my system would lock up hard, unresponsive even to Ctrl-Alt-Del for a few minutes until finally BF3 exited and the Battlelog site came back with anything from a disconnect message to one saying I'd been kicked from the server.
Despite having the latest updates to BF3 itself, as well as for EA's bloated and unnecessary Origin software, PunkBuster, and my system's video drivers and Windows updates, the disconnects continued to occur, making it so that I seldom if ever got to the end of a round without being disconnected.
Finally I decided to take the plunge and configure my DSL router with port forwarding specific to BF3's needs, according to this page on EA's support site.
The site PortForward.com handily provides instructions specific to many router makes and models for the PC, XBox 360, and PS3 versions of Battlefield 3. One note, for the listed TCP ports specific to the PC version, I found that all but ports 80 (http) and 443 (https) were necessary to seemingly work around the disconnect issues I'd been having. You might need these ports forwarded if you plan to have your PC act as a BF3 server, but given that I don't it doesn't seem to make a difference.
Why the BF3 installer or the game itself doesn't specifically tell you which ports to forward in the beginning I don't know. Why EA and DICE rush out their games hurriedly without addressing their users' complaints, I don't know either. I'm happy to have found this works around my problem, and that the game is at least playable for more than 10 minutes or so at a time, but given their track record with previous games and their various issues, I'd like to see BF3 go open source someday and get in the hands of numerous software developers who would likely care more about the game and its users than EA.
