The hell of changing the router in a connected house

Today my BT Home Hub Wifi died and I entered the hell which is the installation of a new router.

I happened to have a spare BT Home Hub which I duly installed via the CD, carefully arranging not to have BT-Yahoo as my home page and not to be parasitized by the Yahoo toolbar.

My first mistake was to change the WiFi security password. The laptop immediately dropped the wireless connection and refused henceforth to recognise the router - and could not be persuaded otherwise. Trying a re-installation with the CD, it wouldn't accept my preferred password. So back to factory defaults and at least the laptop can now access the Internet.

What's easy? Mobile phones and tablets are no problem. They find the new SSID and the password is accepted no problem. Other devices are more problematic.

It seemed impossible to configure the D-Link cameras to the new router wirelessly. I have had to connect via Ethernet (in one case by dusting off my old Netgear Powerline devices).

The printer was a pain when I forgot that entering hex using UPPER CASE characters is never going to work. Eventually I did it again - properly - tapping away on the front of the printer's tiny screen.

The Sky Wireless Connector, used for iPlayer and similar, is reconfigured through the Sky Box itself and after (a) refusing to throw up the necessary screen, and (b) denying it had succeeded, it eventually worked.

It's amazing how many devices around the house are wirelessly linked to the Internet, and ludicrous that it took me two hours of messing around with diverse management interfaces to get most of these devices rehomed.

What's needed is a standard all-device management interface which is universally implemented, so that a home management system can do the whole thing once and for all. The amount of human input actually needed is zero - it should all be plug and play.

That difficult 2nd surveillance camera

At the end of May I bought a D-Link DCS-930/L WiFi home surveillance camera from Amazon (the actual provider was Eagle Shopper EU). With some difficulty I was able to install it (as described here) and access a view of home via my smartphone from anywhere with a net connection.

Emboldened by this I bought a second one a week ago, again from Amazon. In my fast, click-happy way, I failed to notice that the vendor had changed - it was now ShopCuscus. In fact when I opened the box a rather curious UK plug tumbled out, much less neat than the integrated plug of my first device.

Again I ran through the installation process: it all worked until the final stage, where I had to associate the camera with my existing D-Link account in the cloud (this is how you control the connection to the camera). The ShopCuscus Wizard refused to recognise my account.

After much messing around and attempts to re-install, I called D-link tech support. The guy suggested that the problem was the new supplier - perhaps it was an imported camera with a different spec? He suggested I wrap the camera up and send it back. I was unimpressed.

In the end I set up a second D-Link account with my backup email address and downloaded the (cheap) paid-for D-link Android app to conveniently access it. The free app is configured to access my original camera. It seems a lot of messing around to check that the cat hasn't died on us when we're on holiday!

The moral of this tale is two fold:

1. Always check that you buy stuff from one vendor, as system integration with multiple vendors is a nightmare.

2. The D-Link hardware is good, but the quality of the re-sellers' software is too brittle and unsophisticated. I think most of us believe we could program a module to link up correctly with a pre-existing D-link account - how hard can it be?

Bird-watching in comfort

I recently posted about the process of installing a WiFi surveillance camera (the D-Link DCS-930L). Here's what it's being used for.

Clare watching the blue-tit fledglings

Clare reports that the blue-tit fledglings are just showing their cute little faces through the bird-box entrance: she then scampered upstairs to watch through the window herself. Thankfully I have not been asked to install a camera in the bird-box!

WiFi surveillance camera (D-Link DCS-930L)

D-Link is based in Taiwan and seemed to have the best reviews for WiFi surveillance cameras. That's not to say much as these self-contained WiFi cameras uniformly carry a reputation for being very difficult to install and to get working. I bought it from Amazon.

The camera itself, in action, has a short power lead (about a metre) and communicates its video over a WiFi link. It doesn't need to be plugged into a computer so it can be put anywhere near a power socket.

I found the installation lengthy and fraught but finally got the thing working. Here's a picture of its current raison d'etre, spying on the bird box in the back garden - which is inhabited.

Spot the bird box - the occupant is too much to hope for!

Installation (via a Windows 7 HP laptop) is entirely driven by the Wizard on the CD. It starts in a straightforward fashion: the camera is attached to the router by a supplied Ethernet cable and is powered up. The camera gets to know the router and its front light turns green.

The first hitch came when the installation program repeatedly failed to find an Internet connection to D-link's servers in 'the cloud'. This problem was resolved by restarting the BT hub router (I find the BT home hub often unreliable and benefiting from restarts). Success at last.

The next problem was an out-of-date version of Java: D-link require the latest version if you're running Chrome. After manually uninstalling the previous version I finally got the latest Java version to verify.

After that, I was able to get on to the D-link website and see the camera images for the first time. I then downloaded the Android app to my Galaxy S3 (this is straightforward from the website) and it worked.

My second laptop had to go through a similar (and messy) Java install before it was able to access the D-link website and get real-time images. I had saved the D-link URL to the Chrome tool-bar which Google helpfully syncs between machines.

So now everything works. There is a camera manual on the CD which has a lot more info than appears in the set-up Wizard - in particular it tells you how to configure more advanced functions such as motion detection and email notifications.

My first impression is that it's a rather basic device: the video-resolution is fair at best and the sound seems crackly; set-up was too technically-demanding and brittle. This seems to reflect the state-of-the-art, i.e. it's early days. Looking at some of the reviews of other cameras, I'm just grateful it works at all.

The ultimate camera function is pet-surveillance, when we go on holiday.