Amcrest Doorbell working on NVR, but not app

[softbox]

Hey everyone!

I have a 1 month old Amcrest AD110 doorbell that has worked well for the most part. I have it added to the Amcrest Home app, as well as my Amcrest NVR.

Recently, I stopped getting notifications when motion is detected, so I went to investigate. The app was no longer seeing the doorbell, claiming that it was offline. BUT, my two Amcrest NVR's still see the doorbell, and the camera is still connected to my wifi with good signal strength.

I tried deleting the doorbell from the app, holding the side button the enable hotspot, and walked through the installation again. The camera re-joined my network fine, shows up on my NVRs fine, but the app said the camera could not contact Amcrest servers.

No network changes have happened recently, and everything else is working.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Revo2Maxx]

Sadly you will have to do a factory Reset of the camera doorbell at this time....

So press and hold the camera doorbell until you hear it say that it is resetting. ONCe reset enable hotspot and add back into the Smart Home app.. ONce all said and done it will work sadly until the next IP change and then will have be to repeated until a nother FW comes out to fix the issue of weekly offline events do to changing IP to the Cloud service...

[softbox]

My doorbell is set with a static IP (through my router), so it's always getting the same one. It also hasn't fallen offline at all over the past month. Is there something with the cloud service that's causing it to not work?

[Revo2Maxx]

Yes it isn't your IP that isn't working it is the DNS to the Cloud that is making it not work to the app... It seems that on a Round Robin setup which is a Networking balancing format it seems that it is hard coded to stay on a cloud IP longer then needed and when it tries to access this IP it comes down as being offline and changes the Doorbell to offline rather then changing the IP to a good IP for the cloud.

So by doing a Factory reset it will then connect with the new IP that should come up if it was not setup on a static IP.. Something called Sticky... I know of 3 types of Round Robin, Normal, Load balancing, and Sticky and this seems like a Sticky setup.. While it isn't good for people that only have the App but it might after a set time load a new IP on its own... However that isn't good if you want to use the app, Plus anything that is Cloud based like Motion might not work without the app connection because going to cloud...

[amcrest168]

hi @softbox, there is an issue with the latest firmware that resulted in the doorbell's ability to find the right cloud server as revo2maxx explained. if your router is on factory firmware, then perhaps your best bet is to perform a hard reset on the doorbell. there is no need to remove the doorbell from the app.

if you're using an opensource router firmware like openwrt, you have an option to configure the router dnsmasq to direct dms.zencamcloud.com to an active could server serving the doorbell. as of now, they are 3.210.92.130 and 35.168.244.201. reboot the router and the doorbell can find the right cloud server without having to perform a hard reset on the doorbell. i know amcrest customers shouldn't have to do this but there is an issue with the firmware and amcrest has not yet come up with a better solution other than to patiently wait for the next firmware update. however thanks for this forum, members were able to share issues and ideas to come up with a workaround solution.

[softbox]

After factory resetting the doorbell camera and getting it back onto my app this past weekend, I saw that there was a firmware update available, version 1.000.00AC004.0.R.200702. Anyone know if this update is supposed to fix the issue? The update wasn't available when I first installed the camera, so i assume it came out sometime in the past few weeks.

[amcrest168]

hi @softbox, i have updated my doorbell to 20200702 and i did not encounter any issue. consider updating the firmware during the day time so night vision is not enabled. 20200702 should fix the offline server issue.

[softbox]

Thanks @amcrest168 . I have been running on the updated firmware version for a few days now, and the camera has been online and stable for a little over a week since i had factory reset it. hopefully that solves the issue!

[amcrest168]

hi @softbox, i hope so too.