I bought 2 x G100 cameras. I’m pretty impressed to be honest. Finding a HomeKit camera that records continuously 24/7 locally to an SD card has been impossible to find until now. And for a price much less that half of alternative HomeKit cameras, I honestly thought they were miss priced.
The reason I want it recording continuously, is because HomeKit frequently misses things that would be important. Also if someone is planning to steal from the doorstep or break-in, they use WiFi jammers that block any HomeKit/cloud recordings, making local SD storage a valuable backup.
I thought WiFi would frequency cut out, as our previous camera had a much bigger arial and frequently lost signal. However surprising the signal has been pretty solid.
Unfortunately after about 5 days of use, both cameras, about 16 hours apart, just locked up.
Not only did they go offline, they also stopped recording to the SD card. I’m hoping they’ll be a firmware fix for this. I anticipated WiFi failing now and again, but I would not expect the cameras failing entirely including local recordings so soon. They were fine after a reboot, but that isn’t always easy to do remotely.
FYI, I tested the local SD still recorded when it loses its wireless signal, by blocking the camera at the router end for 30 minutes to see what happened. It still recorded to the SD for the entire time. So it wasn’t just a case of loosing WiFi, it conked out completely.
Other than this, I pretty much love them, so it’s a shame.
Thanks you your opinion… I reiterate… it did NOT record on to the SD CARD, which it does, with or without a WiFi connection to the router. So you’re incorrect, something more is at play.
Check your micro-sd, maybe the problem is in it, replace the sd with another one and check it again, and reset the camera to factory settings, this should help.
If the problem is not resolved, please contact support support@aqara.com
Just to update. I turned off Aqara cloud recording and it has been solid ever since. I think recording to the SD card, Aqara cloud and HomeKit iCloud was a bit much for it.
That said Aqara support asked me turn back on Aqara cloud recording to see if they’ve fixed something on the back end. I did this yesterday and it’s still been fine, so it may have been something to do with the cloud connection.
Now these are working solidly, id happily recommend them to anyone
Then there was a firmware update that mentioned fixing frequent off-lining.
So I’ve been running the camera on the firmware update now for 9 days. It seems to have stopped the offline/locking up issue completely. I haven’t had to reboot them at all. So I’m really pleased. Thank you developers.
So I’ll be keeping the cameras.
It was very frustrating that I was given all sorts of conflicting advice. Aqara even suggested that I return both my cameras as they suspected there was a failure in the power module (they confirmed the power module they’re talking about is on the camera and not the power supply). That would have been quite a task, as they’re both high up walls and require borrowing a ladder to both retrieve them and put replacements back when the arrived several days later. I held off, as the same thing was happening to both cameras, it similar times I felt it was a software issue and wanted to try a few other things first such as replacing the USB C cable.
Turns out the developers were aware of the issue and were writing a fix. That should have been communicated to the technical team. If I knew they were working on it, I would have just waited for the firmware update.