Blink Camera Wifi Experience

Sharing this for others using Blink Cameras, or any device that uses Wifi intermittently, i.e. only when needed to save battery life. I recently turned on access control in my router, allowing all devices to connect but letting me identify each device and document it. So far so good, Blink hub of course shows up as one of the devices. No cameras. Dummy me forgot that the cameras connect back to the hub via wifi. When I locked it down, so that no new devices can connect without permission, the camera was locked out since it establishes connectivity only as needed. I didn’t notice this for a few weeks, no motion alerts isn’t abnormal where i have the camera. Then one night I tripped the motion sensor, the camera LED turned on but didnt report back on motion. Fiddling around didnt get me anywhere so I finally sat down today to debug, with no joy trying the obvious stuff (deleting/re-adding the hub and camera). While opening a help incident with Blink they asked some specific question about wifi security, which allowed me to connect the dots. Bottom line, if you are concerned about wifi security and turn on access control, you need to add by hand the MAC address of the Blink Camera and any other intermittently connecting devices. Its hard to debug at first, they dont show up in the wifi attached devices list as blocked, because they try to connect then quickly disconnect. At least on Netgear. Hopefully this helps someone in the future.