Recently I made the mistake of using the waterproofing jacket improperly on one of my Reolink RLC-810A cameras. Silly me thought I could use it on a cat6 cable, where it was clearly too big, and failed to seal properly.
In the course of debugging, I did find that cutting the reset button off these cameras helped. Unfortunately it didn't fix one of my cameras, so I took it off its mount to investigate further.
Aside: it seems reolink knows the reset button gets water in it and then bootloops the camera. The replacement for the camera I'm playing with in this post came with a very waterproof connector cover. They clearly understand the problem and have dealt with it on new shipments.
This camera clearly needed the help. When I unplugged the ethernet cable, one of the contactors fell out and the whole thing looked moldy (and smelled a bit too).
I ordered a replacment for the camera, and then thought "Can I save this unit?"
Yes. Yes it is possible. Pinout pictures near the bottom.
Trailing from the camera are the reset line (clipped), ethernet cable, and a DC barrel plug (just in case)
I clipped the cable near the connector, so I could put on a new 8p8c connector. These are similar to RJ45 and the terms are interchangable if you are a computer networks guy these days. I expected to see, then the 8 conductors that peek out from every cat cable: orange, orange striped, green, green striped, blue, blue striped, and brown, brown striped. Instead, I was met with 6 conductors: Orange, Orange striped, Green, Green striped, Purple, and Grey.
Well, 6 conductors, 8 pins on my new jack, what's the wiring?
I tried continuity testing between the pins on the back and the front. If I'm going to do this again, I'd definitely get an alligator clip support, or even get a sacrificial ethernet cable and use it to test the jack side of the connection.
Unforunately it seemed my notes were weird. I had not yet learned that for some PoE cables, blue and brown are used for DC+ and DC- voltages. So I had to find a way to get a definite answer.
The answer was cutting open the jack. Fortunately it seemed to be made of rubber, and turned out to have 3 parts: the pins, a plastic housing, and a rubber shape that made up most of the jack.
With the pinouts clarified, it's time to do the jack. First the finish product:
And finally, it turns out that purple is DC+ and grey is DC-
