Embarrassing (and this time it was me)

I agreed to do a review of a camera system. It is new, and there wasn’t any publicly available documentation on it at the time I was offered the sample. I made the incorrect assumption that it would support RTSP, because it had an always-on base. It has solar-powered cameras, which I think is a common use case for outdoor cameras.

On the plus side, the cameras seem to be pretty nice.

On the negative side, there’s no RTSP, and the range is not impressive.

So unimpressive was the range that I had to run Ethernet to my garage, which I’d been meaning to do for over a year, anyway. I also ran power to my garage door header.

In the garage door header space? An 8-port PoE switch. I plugged in my uplink. Then my outdoor Ubiquiti WAP. Active links on the switch.

But my WAP was showing up in mesh mode.

Some of the terminations I put in were keystone. Some were RJ45 ends. And something wasn’t right. Well, it turns out that I had made a mistake. If you’ve ever seen those 2-piece RJ45 connectors with the small, slide in “shoe”, I loaded up the shoe upside-down. Ugh. Yes, I should have just dug out my Fluke cable tester, but I mistakenly thought I’d not run into any issues.

And, as chance would have it, that connector was the last one I checked.

Oh, and did I mention that I did a lot of the work in the pouring rain? No? Well, I did.

All of that is to say that projects, no matter what your skill level, tools, or preparation are still subject to some randomness in the outcomes.