Thanks for looking into that ticket. Something definitely fell through the cracks.
On Jan 9th I wrote back to Max: Have you made any progress on this bug?? I didn’t hear back from you after I sent my detailed feedback on your test firmware a month ago.
On Jan 29th, I wrote again: If you read through this ticket, you’ll see that back on Dec 6th, Max sent me a test load of firmware for my V2 camera, hoping to fix the long-standing issue with Night Vision constantly flipping on and off (it didn’t).
I suppose the good news is that even though my cams have been going clickity-click for months (5 or 10 minutes, at dawn and dusk), the mechanical shutter mechanism has not worn out:-). That’s some good mechanical engineering!
Gwen, I submitted logs this morning for 3 out of the 4 cameras I have set for night vision. Those flipped on and off @ dawn today, with the worst one doing it for 4 minutes. The tickets are 257599, 257768, and 257840. - FYI
Here’s another ticket: 259606. It’s a pan-cam that flips on/off/on/off every day at dawn and dusk. Takes a few minutes before it finally makes up its mind.
(259606-257599)/2 = about a thousand new tickets per day!
No wonder Wyze support is swamped.
Gwen,
I got a reply back from Support re ticket 259606 that I submitted on this last week. The response that I received said in part:
It seems like your cam might be turning on and off the night vision mode to adjust to the change in brightness as the sun goes down. I know this can be a bit annoying, but this is something the camera does based on its surroundings.
This is something that is due to the area the cam is located can make it a bit tricky for it to pick which option to use.
If it helps, you can always manually turn the night vision on or off from the live stream.
It really shouldn’t be tricky for the camera to decide which mode to use. And I’m sure you’ll agree that the notion of the Customer waking up at dawn every day to manually change the mode from night to day is a bit impractical…
I have but one word to say on this: hysteresis. Please share with your dev colleagues.
I got a boilerplate response that asked me questions that were already in the write-up (like what kind of camera, what versions of app & firmware, etc), then it recommended I reset the camera and get back to them (take two aspirin and call me in the morning?).
I replied @UserCustomerGwen didn’t send me to you to get troubleshooting assistance. This is a known problem, and she is trying to get logs showing the problem to the developers so they can formulate a solution. Will they pass the logs on to the developers?
Oh yeah, they also called me Don, when both the email I sent and my profile here says my name is Wayne, lol. But being a boilerplate response I suspect it was just copied & pasted from the last person they sent it to.
Well, I tried @UserCustomerGwen. Support just got back to me again on the same ticket I just wrote about above, and said the IR lights are supposed to work this way. To quote:
Hey Don (they still think my name is Don, even though I corrected them last time and signed Wayne),
Sorry for the delay in reply here! I have been discussing this ticket with the team and it would appear as though this is an intended function.
We have made changes to our algorithm to avoid it from constantly turning on and off the IR lights. The intended action is for the Wyze Cam to turn the IR lights on and off, up to 3 times in 60 seconds. We are looking into this to see if it needs to be adjusted.
If you are noticing that this is happening more than 3 times within 60 seconds please submit an app log as soon as it happens.
In the meantime let me know if you have any other questions or concerns and I will be happy to assist you!
Hope you enjoy the rest of your day!
I told him I did submit a log. This was it. Sigh.
@kyphos is right, they just need to add hysteresis.
I got a similar reply, indicating that “we do have this option in the cam, where it will only go in and out of the night vision 3 times within 60 seconds”. Somewhat consistent with the answer that you got, except that turning the IR lights on and off is quite different than flipping the filter.
FYI - I updated my PanCam yesterday with the latest release, hoping that they might have tweaked the night-detect algorithm that has been misbehaving since last November (when I first filed a bug report). No such luck. The IR filter started clicking at dawn this morning, and continued for about 10 minutes. Clickity-click went the filter, as dawn arrived. Eventually, the sky became bright enough that the algorithm stayed in day mode.
Note that I have the IR lights disabled, since the cam is inside looking out through a window. Maybe that’s my problem - LOL. If the response you received is correct (algorithm is designed to prevent turning the lights on/off more than 3 times in 60 seconds), that limiter won’t have any impact on the operation of my camera, since the LEDs are turned off.
An algorithm designed to restrict switching to no more than 3 times in a minute is sub-optimal. Some would say goofy. They don’t need to “adjust” it. They need to add some hysteresis to the decision threshold.
Agreed. As someone who worked 35 years in electronic engineering, hysteresis is definitely the answer. And so simple too. Require it to be a little brighter before coming out of night vision, and a little darker before going into night vision. They would spend less time tweaking those two variables than trying to explain this as normal. Have happier customers too.
None of the 3 cameras I reported are using their IR lights. Two are behind glass, one isn’t. One faces a light, two don’t. My eyes can’t see any variation in light level, yet these things do. This is a simple hysteresis tweak I could do in 2 minutes if they would point me at the code, lol.
I have received confirmation from the dev side that they should only switch back and forth twice before we set a high threshold so that strong lights should trigger the switch again. Could you two send me videos demonstrating this issue that I can give to the dev team? I’ll also tag @ArthurH here.
@Newshound, did you sign up for your email account with the name Wayne? My bet would be that they’re going off of whatever is popping up in our system from your email address but if it’s not that then I’ll have NO idea why they’re using the wrong name. -shrugs-
Gwen
I sent just such a video to support on July 9 at 4:16pm EDT. It was tagged to ticket 260080. However, in case you can’t locate it in your ticketing system, I’ve uploaded it to my Dropbox. You and @ArthurH can find it here:
The video is about 9 minutes long, taken with a PanCam which had been upgraded to the latest firmware the preceding day. Note that the IR lights are turned off to avoid reflections from window.
Over the course of the 9 minutes, you’ll see that the IR filter flipped back and forth 10 times (i.e., 19 clicks in total) as the dawn sky slowly brightened. There might have been a couple more flip-flops prior to the start of the video. I started recording when it woke me up, but I may have missed a couple.
Wayne,
I received another reply back from Wyze Support. The Wyze specialist had watched my 9-minute clickity-click video. Apparently, the reason that my camera switches back and forth and back and forth is because of its location. He wrote:
I can say that currently your case is a bit more unique given the position where you have this Wyze Cam located.
Me bad - I’ve located the camera overlooking my backyard. I guess that’s a (unique) edge case that the Day/Night algorithm wasn’t designed for.
The Specialist went on to suggest that I should “start a conversation” so that they could consider the issue further. “Our forums would be a great place to start”. He gave me the link to the Wishlist page so I could create a new topic. Needless to say, I’m not going to pursue that. Perhaps @ArthurH will be motivated to enhance the Day/Night decision algorithm armed with solid evidence of erratic behavior (my video), not to mention an offer of coding assistance (yours:-).
They must be looking for indoor room lighting flipping on and off? What happens when that indoor room slowly gets dark? Same thing as us, I imagine. In any case, hysteresis will fix all. They spend so much effort resisting, when so little would be required to fix it.
Lol, now that’s out of touch. Both already exist and have for some time.
Oh yes - the same thing happens in an indoor room. When I started this thread (back in Nov 2018), it was to report my V2 going click-click-click at dusk. It was located in an interior hallway. I sent them logs. I sent them a video. And in my first post, I suggested that they should add some hysteresis to the detection algorithm.
I’ve run out of starch on this (one needs lots of starch with which to stiffen the rope that we’re pushing on).
I’ve a clear V2 that just started doing the flipping at dawn/dusk. Besides clicking being annoying I’m concerned that the IR filter will wear out and get stuck. @UserCustomerGwen Has anything been done about this?
Recently, the dawn behavior of my pan-cam is not consistent. For a long time (months), at dawn it’s been going clickity-click (every 30 to 60 seconds or so) over an interval of several minutes. Just can’t make up its mind. This morning, it only clicked once, flipping from night to day mode as it should. Same view of backyard and sky, same firmware, same weather conditions (clear sky, not cloudy/rainy/foggy). There’s been no change in the setting or environment that I can see.
