Glitchy

Newbie here! I bought and installed 2 Pan Cams. I am in the 14 day free trial of the Cam Plus feature with 4 days remaining. I also have SD cards in both cameras.
I am finding that I am having to restart the cams at least 1x daily. It will stop giving me notifications. Sometimes, it will show that there isn’t an SD card. Restarting fixes these issues but this is glitchy. How can I rely on getting notifications in case of a home security issue? Am I missing something? I plan to subscribe (pay the fee) for the cloud service to get notifications but so far the trial has been unreliable.

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Hi @phyllis16 and welcome to the community forum.
Take the uSD cards out and see if the truuble persists.
Test the card in a computer:

  • Check the disk with the command line C:\Windows\system32>ChkDsk X: /r Where X is the uSD card
  • Format the uSD card and un-check the default “Quick” option so it can mask out bad cells.

If the camera is attempting to record over a bad cell it will retry several times and may cause glitchy performance.

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Thank you. I was not able to format with a computer. My Mac doesn’t have a SD slot. My daughter’s Windows laptop doesn’t either.
The app does allow me to format the SD card. I did that. Will see…

Hi @phyllis16 The format in the Wyze app will not check for errors or map out bad cells. It is a “Quick Format”.

Quick format just marks the partition as “formatted” and destroys the journal that keeps tracks of the files and their locations on hard drive.

Full format will clear files completely from the partition, rebuild the file system, volume label, and cluster size, and scans partition for logical bad sectors; that’s why full format is slower than quick format. Wyze devices must always use the FAT32 format.

To perform a Full Format, a uSD adapter such as the one pictured below is required. You can also use this to pull information off the cards or put a new image on the Wyze using the manual update process.

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-MobileLite-Plus-microSDHC-Reader/dp/B085P5FDXQ/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=kingston+usb+adapter&qid=1603297722&sr=8-2

It always preferable to use High Endurance cards (HE) for these devices. 32 Gb Max for Firmware update.
Click this link for more information on High Endurance Cards

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WOW THANK YOU! Great info. Will order.

@dr.know I bought the high performance SD cards and installed. It is recording fine. The problem is that after a day or so, I stop getting Notifications. I can go to the live stream on my phone and view playback even without the notification. I have to restart the camera and then it will work again for another day or so. This makes it unreliable as a “security camera”. Any other ideas I can try?
Thx.

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You can set a scheduled rule to restart all your cameras, daily, weekly, whichever you chose. I restart all my cams via rule every night at an odd hour.

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Hey, can that be done via an Alexa rule? I’ve held off creating any rules in Wyze app until now. In fact I was planning to use a smart plug to do a scheduled hard reboot instead. You find the soft reboots are enough to keep things stable?

Oh and to Phyllis, I gave up on relying on Wyze SD card support a year ago. It wasn’t worth the stress. Constantly disassociating from the camera.

Thank you! Going to try that now.

Hi @phyllis16 Glad to hear you have the High Endurance uSD card and its recording fine.

When the cam detects motion (or sound if enabled) it sends the 12 second clip to the server, then pushes out a notification to your Wyze app.
When you look through the playback are events marked with a green line?
Might check the camera’s signal strength fom the app.

Thank you for your input. I have been restarting and it’s been working fine, I was just frustrated with having to restart manually…duh, I had not even looked at or thought about automating with a schedule (newbie here hadn’t looked at that feature) until @Omgitstony recommended. Hopefully, this will solve that issue for me. As for the SD cards, I was having the same problem until @dr.know recommended the High Endurance cards. Since I installed the new microSD High Endurance cards (Samsung Pro Endurance), I have found the SD much more reliable…so far. Only been a week but the local storage has stayed on and recording events (I don’t do continuous) as expected.

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Yes, I see the green lines. No problems with the recordings. Just was not getting notifications after a day. I just set up an automated camera “restart” schedule for daily. Hoping this resolves the issue. Thank you again @dr.know for your recommendations.

Looks like Alexa can do the hard reset via a plug by turning that on and off, but doesn’t do the “reset” command. Can’t see how to send any commands to cameras,such as turn on motion detection, reset camera etc.

I’ve done the reset rule for a long time. I initially set it up to help with audio to video sync, and to help keep a bridge online. I haven’t noticed any issues since, but haven’t stopped the rule to see if the issues return though.

Thanks much, @OMGItsTony, I think I’ll try it. Too bad I just ordered extra smart plugs through an Echo Show bundle deal. :wink:

My Wyzecams hardly ever lock up completely so a scheduled soft reboot will probably help a lot. Hmm, any way to confirm it was actually rebooted? I don’t see an uptime indicator in Device Info…

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Sorry to hound you on this, not having same problem here. One more question. . .
Since you see the Green lines in playback are you also getting the Events tagged with a Red exclamation point?

I leave my phone off at night and when turned on, get a tone notification for each motion event that occurred overnight. When those 12 second recordings are uploaded to the AWS cloud it pushes out a notification to the phone.

I would have thought it was a problem with setting on the phone/app. But if rebooting the camera solves the problem then it sounds more like a communication or sync problem with the AWS server.

No Red exclamation point showing in Playback (even when I get the notifications).

Just looked at my event alert. Its a dot now instead of exclamation point.
When I touch the Events button I can see the 12 second videos recorded on the AWS server. These are separate from the recording on the uSD card.

So, it took me a couple of days to make sure but I am NOT seeing the Red Event Alert. When I tap on Events, I can see the Event recording. I seem to be getting the notifications now that I have a scheduled restart of the camera ( although I thought that it stopped sending notifications yesterday at one point but will continue to test that through out today).

Glad you found a work around for the Notifications.
Under the camera’s Device Settings I have Notifications and Motion turned on. Haven’t had to reboot the camera. K, now understand other people do need to reboot and are fine with it.

I have those same settings. Wonder why I don’t get the red dot for Events. Does that only happen because you’ve had the phone off or does it happen all the time?