Hello Everyone,
I had some fun experience setting up my Nest Cam Battery, and it took me alot of internet surfing to find answers for my questions and issues, henceforth, I am writing this topic "hopefully" as a conclusion to my experience, and would be a great answer in one place for everyone who'd experience the same thing.
I've had for more than a year a nest cam wired indoor, I never had any problems with it, it always worked, occasionally if left for more than 3-4 months continuously on, would require a restart (unplug from electricity, wait 10 seconds, working again), but aside of that charming.
I've recently moved to a new location, and I noticed that I need to monitor my balcony, so I bought 2 new cams, a nest battery and an indoor wired one.
The indoor wired one, connected to the wifi immediately, and is working with no problem. Whoever, the battery one was refusing to connect. I tried for around 4-5 hours occasionally when I pass by it, try to connect, but it just loads ... and then something went wrong. And so after digging on the internet for answers, I found a reddit question with a person having the same problem, and in one of the answers, there was a genius person who said the following:
"I was able to successfully connect my camera through my mobile hotspot by changing the hotspot's credentials to match those of my home Wi-Fi. After making this change, I disconnected my home Wi-Fi, set up the camera on my hotspot, and then reconnected my home Wi-Fi. This allowed everything to connect and function properly."
And so I followed the instructions, the camera did indeed connect to the phone, but was still refusing to connect to the router.
the second day, another round of digging had to happen, and this time I found that because Nest Cam Battery is a first generation camera, it "does not like" WPA3 technology. So what I did, I got my tp-link repeater, set it up to carry the same name of the main router, lower the signal strength of the router to the minimum, plug in the repeater in the corridor, and put the camera in the farthest away room from the main router, to force it to connect to the WIFI name, but from the repeater since it has WPA/WPA2 instead of WPA2/WPA3 authentication... and guess what, it finally worked.
So in conclusion, you either have to trick your camera AND connect it to older technology, or, google have to come up with a new generation camera to adapt.
After the setup was successful, I wanted to setup a routine since I don't want the battery cam to be on at all times (routine using presence sensing, when home -> turn off, when away -> turn on), so I could successfully add it to the routine, however, whenever I would leave home and/or comeback, the camera would still be off, or it would be on if I left it on. With alot of back and forth and manually clicking home or away on nest app, I just decided (by chance) since it is an outdoor camera, to put it on the balcony and use the indoor wired one for the routine.... and guess what, the camera works flawlessly.
So in my opinion, all "my problems" that happened in relation to the nest/home app, only started to show when I decided to buy the battery camera. Is it because it is 1st generation? probably our google amazing guys would be able to answer this question.
I hope everyone a happy and successful Nesting!
