A friend bought two Reolink Argus solar cameras and had me install them.
Didn’t get far with the install. Reason being it kept failing to connect to the WiFi network. The whole setup is the dumbest way I have seen for setting up a WiFi camera.
A typical WiFi camera will have a temporary WiFi adhoc connection that a phone or tablet would interact with for the setup. For a example with the Hikvision HD-1 video doorbell the Hik-Connect app you scan the device QR code and then it will scan for the SSID of the doorbell, connect to it and pass along the WiFi info you want it to use and when the setup process is done the open WiFi connection is turned off.
Well Reolink decided to go way off course with this. With the Reolink app you scan the QR code and then tell it some info. Then it generates a QR code you have to show to the camera. Meanwhile the camera is constantly going on and on with “Welcome to Reolink” in different languages. The Reolink app also darkens the screen and depending on the phone makes it too dark. After messing with it for five minutes it finally sees it and when you think it’s got it you get an audible “Connection to router failed”. I literately tried this for an hour and just gave up. I tried it with two phones and a tablet. I also changed some settings to the WiFi by separating the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios. also tried different lighting and tried to take a screen shot with the QR code to avoid the darken screen but no dice.
I typically don’t rate stuff but if I was to give it a rating between one and ten I would give this a one.
The IT Garage 