just to followup my own report of problems earlier in this thread.... today I finally solved my cloud connection.
Blackvue customer support was basically useless - and
extremely slow to respond on top of that. But I stumbled upon the answer on my own and thought I'd post the info here in case it's of use to someone in future.
IGNORE the rest of this post if you're NOT using a hotspot/router with MAC address filtering, or trying to connect to an open wifi hotspot that does so (like some ISPs have with their free hotspots around town e.g. as described in
this article)
My problem connecting the dashcam in cloud mode to my home router was due to the fact that I have MAC address filtering enabled on the router (which I knew at the start) but more importantly,
the dashcam has 2 different MAC addresses, one for direct connection to smartphone and different one for the cloud connection. And it's not at all obvious what the cloud wifi's MAC address is.
to make things more confusing, the documation is really bad - 1) firstly it says the dashcam's MAC address can be found in the default SSID name, but that only gives you the last 3 hex digits (a proper MAC address contains 6 hex digits,) for example let's say the dashcam came with default SSID: DR650GW-50A060. Well it's true that the MAC address for the direct connection is xx:yy:zz:50:A0:60 but you're still missing the first 3 hex digits! but I used some wifi network scanning app to figure out those digits. 2) there's no mention anywhere that the cloud interface has a different address, although early on I suspected this might be my problem.
For all other devices with multiple wifi interfaces, they usually have addresses separated by +1, so in my example above, if direct connection wifi is xx:yy:zz:50:A0:60, the logical choice for address for the 2nd interface would be xx:yy:zz:50:A0:
61. I set up my router for this,, as well as ...:60 and :59 just to be safe - but still no dice.
Well it turns out that the cloud wifi interface's address was this: xx:yy:zz:
40:A0:60 - the digit that differed from the other interface wasn't the one I expected. And as I said, there's no clue in the documentation nor did customer support give any sort of hint
Anyhow I now have cloud successfully connecting. My intended use is only when I arrive home and park in my garage, then I can access the dashcam via the cloud from anywhere in my house, instead of having to try to connect by the one window where the signal is strongest (it's a detached garage).
