Camera Is Dying, Did The PoE Injector Cause It?

The cameras were working until you pinged them? I am not clear about this sentence, "My problem when the camera was turn on 1 day, suddenly lost connection when "Ping" command is used. "

Also, you say, "Could it be using cheap/dodgy POE injectors the root cause of the problem?" Who's it here? Are you using PoE injectors provided by ACTi or are they yours? Have you tried connecting them to another PoE injector or a PoE switch?

Are using using a IEEE802.3af ot 802.3at injector. Some 48V injectors are NOT 802.3af/at, and will not work properly with 80a.3af/at camera like the ACTi.

Hi John,

Actually, to make it clear as possible, the camera was working fine, then out of the blue, the camera stop working- meaning the VMS couldn't capture the camera images streaming from the ACTi ACM1231 camera. So, to troubleshoot, I did a PING command on the camera, but it did not respond to the PING command.

In order to check the physical connection was in intact, I got a sample unit of ACM1231 and hooked it up using the same old POE injector(not provided by ACTi, it is 3rd party non-branded imported from China), and the result was the connection was established and the VMS was able to grab video images from the sample unit.

I got a feeling the non-branded POE injector is the root cause of problem because, I had 1 sample unit experienced the same problem last year- cannot established connection- cannot respond to PING command. I did a RMA on the camera, and ACTi Customer Help Desk people / engineers reburned the image on the camera, and now it is working.

Thanks for replying.

Regards

Marcus

Did you try to factory default the ACTi camera that stopped working? I'd like to rule out that it wasn't a transient problem with the camera.

Well, as I mentioned it earlier, I did try it.

In fact, I tried it several times. No matter how long to you hold the reset button,

The Power LED red light will not blink as it should.

Once you see the red light blinks, meaning the camera will return to factory default setting.

So I wondering do you guys has this problem with ACM 1231 camera?

PoE isn't a very complicated thing, really... as long as it's not cranking out excessive voltage or a bunch of spikes or widely-varying voltage, I wouldn't expect the injector to be the issue. By spec, an 802.3af/at device should be able to handle up to 57V, and realistically electronics are usually designed with at least 10% derating over spec, meaning the camera should be able to handle at least 62V input... AND, one would think, should have some sort of input power protection... so it would probably take a badly defective injector to kill it... and if it was that bad, I would have expected it to kill the second camera right away.

My suspicion, since you've successfully tested the injector with a second camera, would be that the camera simply failed for some other reason (or no apparent reason at all, as electronics do from time to time).

Hmmm....may be there is a power surge, since there was a couple of power failure / blackout at my customer premise when it has a heavy down pour during the wet season.

But I did improvised a surge protector power outlet board, to protect such incident happen- protecting the poe injector from cooking when there is a ligtning strike.

So, I only can conclude that I most probably have a very non-standard and non-compliant 802.3af/t 48V POE injector which I bought from ebay: http://www.ebay.com.my/itm/48V-Power-over-Ethernet-injector-/270942345454?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item3f156c18ee

Do you guys agree that ACTi camera has a high failure rate?

Hi Matt,

My suspicion, since you've successfully tested the injector with a second camera, would be that the camera simply failed for some other reason (or no apparent reason at all, as electronics do from time to time).

I did not expect the electronics will fail such easily, as the 1st unit that has this problem is a sample

testing and demo unit from my own personal use, it hardly use at all under 24/7 operation work load.

If such failure does happen, then I would definitely not recommend my customer to buy it at the first place, because it cost 1200 dollars in our currency approx. to have one.

Thank you.

Well, there's a first time for everything :) The occasional camera failure is always a possibility, with ANY brand; I wouldn't rule out the brand or model just because the first one went bad in a short while. I've seen one model line of a different brand (which shall remain unnamed) have a 50% failure rate out-of-the-box (like, we unpack them, hook them up, and fully half of them are faulty in some way)... unfortunately they come from a stockpile that the customer pre-purchased and now insists on using. Oh well, what can ya do.

...may be there is a power surge, since there was a couple of power failure / blackout at my customer premise when it has a heavy down pour during the wet season. But I did improvised a surge protector power outlet board, to protect such incident happen- protecting the poe injector from cooking when there is a ligtning strike.

That's always a possibility. I've seen power surges have very strange effects on components - one camera may die, an identical one on the same power supply won't, and so on. Surge suppressors don't always help, and I've even seen a UPS blow up from a large surge (a tree brought down a 25kV line across a residential line - ouch!), along with everything connected to it.

The injector you linked looks exactly like a handful I bought from DealExtreme a couple years ago, and have been using successfully in several installations and in my test kit. It's a PWM switching-type supply that are normally very reliable - if you can somehow meter the output and it proves to be in-spec, I wouldn't think that's your problem.

I ran across this once and found out it was a problem with the IP stack on my server. My VMS server was unable to ping the camera, but my laptop could! Wierd, huh? After several attempts to chase the problem down I gave up and reloaded the Windows 2003 server to a Windows 2008 server (this was on my list of things to do anyway). Problem went away.

The problem asserted itself on several cameras, not just one. Not sure if is related to your situation or not.

I've also seen this with cameras crashing, a fireware update ususally fixes it. I've never seen a PoE problem cause the camera to become non-responsive.

Hi Matt,

"The injector you linked looks exactly like a handful I bought from DealExtreme a couple years ago, and have been using successfully in several installations and in my test kit. It's a PWM switching-type supply that are normally very reliable - if you can somehow meter the output and it proves to be in-spec, I wouldn't think that's your problem."

Ok, well.. it looks like the firmware on the camera has passed away for good. And the cause of it is not coming from the POE injector.

Thanks.

Regards,

Marcus