Broken Freebie
June 28th, 2005 - 10:00am - No Comments »
On Friday, I went to Geelong to help clean up the “junk” room in the back of the office. This room is supposed to be a work area and store room for spare computer equipment, but since I’ve worked at Deakin I’ve always known it as a junk room.
Richard, Lesly and I spent around three hours sorting good from bad, what we’d keep, what could be thrown out and what we could give away (and chuck out if no one wanted it). Most of the stuff that could be given away (since it was no longer useful to Deakin) was quite old but there were a few things worth taking; Lesly took an old computer (P200 I think) for messing around with as well as an external SCSI CD burner which wasn’t worth using as is, but could be worth salvaging to make an external burner; Richard took a couple of cables and something else good I forget; I only took an Axis 2120 Network Camera which hadn’t worked for the past two years and should have been thrown out.
When I got the camera home, I realised I’d forgotten about looking for a few extra things that come along with it, such as the stand and outside casing; makes no difference if the unit doesn’t work, does it?
After downloading the manual for the camera, I realised there was extremely little I could actually do to fix the problem. The problem was that the unit would power up (well, that’s not a problem) but the ‘network’ light wouldn’t light up to indicate a successful connection to the network.
I did the only thing I could do, and that was to reset the firmware to factory settings. It worked! Sort of. The camera could now be seen on the network, and I was able to give it an IP address and configure it to my liking. However, when viewing the camera, it would simply stop after a minute or two of viewing. Closing the browser and loading up the page would sometimes resolve it, other times you had to turn it off and back on.
The website had firmware updates for the camera; I had to apply two to get the camera up to the current version (the version jumped about 35 versions) and since then, it’s performed beautifully. I have configured the camera so it’s externally available, but other than testing it’s not available yet. I will post when it’s positioned and available for viewing.
A good find, since it was just going to be thrown away!
