Person Detection Update: A New Experiment for Premium Features

Wyze News
612

A lot of people is a misnomer I think. The entire active population of this forum does not constitute “a lot of people” throw in Reddit and Facebook and your still at the village level not even town sized. :grinning:

Talking about active participation in Wyze related or even camera related forums and groups.

But yes there is lots of conflicting information floating around. I try to apply common sense as much as I can but heck I am wrong more often than I am right myself.

That said considering the angst and ill will being generated by Person Detection here I would be confident in saying if it was easy and free Wyze would have done it and put this whole mess behind them.

XNOR brought more to the table than PD for sure. Nevertheless Wyze used them specifically for their on camera prowess. So again if an existing free to use solution was available and viable we would not be having this discussion.

3 Likes
613

Thanks, just ordered one to try. Canadian price difference on Amazon is not that bad to get 2K and person detection. Not rated for below 0 Celsius but we will see. Be great if a “birdhouse” becomes available for outdoors. My four Wyze cameras will be down to three.

1 Like
614

I did get the sensor kit… but I thought I got amotino sensor, door and window

615

Door / window are contact sensors.

616

I bought 2x EUFY cam pan and tilt

What I don’t like about it about

  1. it only comes in white
  2. in night vision it has to have its 8 bright emitters on
  3. the gain on the microphone

I use it outdoors mounted upside down in a dome looking at porch and sidewalk
In night vision it is completely blind, giving a wonderful view of its reflected innards
(of course this used to be a problem for my many Wyze Cam Pan as well)

I light the porch and have some wyze cams looking out windows also in no night vision mode, but they all have black skins and so don’t have reflections. The White EUFY cam has a bright white arc reflection but can see very well outside of that, probably a bit better then the Wyze.

I like the speakers on the EUFY far superior to the wyze, but the microphone can pick up noise in the silence. Every time I go to live stream, it is making terrible static like noise so I disable it, but next time it is back on.

As for detection is seems great, and I have tracking on. In one of the comments someone said if you move (pan or tilt) it, then it won’t return to position, true. However, if you set it where you want and enable tracking it does return to this position.

As for pet detection I have a crumpled up tarp out there on the porch that looks a bit like a black cat (tail included) so when the breeze blows and the bushes move I get a pet detection and a nice portrait of my crumpled tarp.

I don’t actually have any pets out there but it does an excellent job of spotting trespasser cats. These generally lay on my porch most of the day and it only gives alerts when they move around. When there is more than one its AI seems to prefer to track the orange cat over the black or black and white ones.

If it came in black or had a skin (doubtful by the shape of the thing) and could turn off its emitters then I would buy at least 4 more of them.
It would be nice if I could tune down the microphone, or it remembered my audio was off last time.

Also I can’t do a custom pet command because the app has the record button down at the bottom of the screen and it says press and hold, but when I do up pops a keyboard over it and it considers itself released and so records nothing. But maybe that is because I have only installed the app on a side loaded google play store onto one of my many Amazon Fire 10.1

The video looks great and detection is great, also the camera is much more silent then Wyze

Meanwhile other outdoor areas are watched by many black skinned Wyze Pan, with 18x Lifx BR30+ 940nm external lighting. How can I complain about these cheap cams (just go look up what those light bulbs cost)

3 Likes
617

That’s good to hear. Some times my WYZE cams will stop recording to the SD card and I’ll have to restart the cameras, and it appears to be random. It had me wondering if it’s due to internet issues since Spectrum has been having a lot of trouble lately. I might have to do a test tomorrow and cut off my internet on the router to see if it causes a problem. Might take the opportunity to set up my cams on a separate SSID so testing is easier. Right now I have all my IOT devices on a separate SSID, but I think I’ll put the cams on a separate one as well.

618

Sorry I could have been clearer - your motion sensor IS the PIR sensor I was talking about. It detects live humans / animals based on heat so it’s not fooled by things like moving shadows.

619

So lets do a little out of box thinking…
Is Wyze using multiple cloud providers ? oracle, google, azure etc to get the best cost per detection per hour/day ? Might be easier(to manage etc) to have it all on aws, but may be able to get better cost savings moving things around the cloud providers.
ARM chips will be cheaper to use in the cloud ,can the code use this?
Unless its all GPU processed and not cpu?

As others have said, if the Motion areas could be more granular, multiple spots or motion over x seconds, lots of false positive (shadows, leafs,cars, rain etc) being sent to be analysed and not being watched/notified. (Yes its an indoor camera, but no doubt lots pointing outside as per wyze continuous motion capture promotional videos of the stolen bike or out windows etc.)

would be interesting to know the rate of events tagged without people, not being notified and not being viewed in the app, if its a large number and can be reduced by better motion triggering.

long term,
Release a v3 camera that has PIR/MW sensor for motion, sending less videos to be processed using compute and storage.
Compute in a base station (assuming a base station will become the new norm)
use a rpi to do local processing, or an ARM compute on a usb stick device (add to base station?)

Lastly, once you start charging ongoing for person detection, it will need to work really well, no more beta tags

1 Like
620

If you are referring to a cam running the Wyze RTSP software, maybe so.

But my personal experience running the stock Wyze firmware on numerous V2 cams has been quite different.

1 Like
621

Don’t forget that All the Wize cams are old re-badged Xiaomi cameras which have been slightly manufacturer customised For Wyze. That goes for the app too. These old Xiaomi cameras don’t have person detection.
Therefore expect new cameras to be the same. New Xiaomi cameras have on board person / human detection and free Rolling 7 day cloud storage. If Wize don’t follow with the same then they won’t survive.

2 Likes
622

So there’s hope for the V3 then?
:grinning:

Interesting that the new ground breaking “disruptively affordable smart home” company has to basically follow the footsteps of what Xiaomi happens to make beforehand.

Hopefully the Wyze customizations add a lot of value…
:thinking:

1 Like
623

I forgot the technical stuff to it but the first time I saw it I was confused. Someone here may be able to explain but we had no internet for hours yet able to watch live. Now if you lose power you won’t be able to watch unless the cams are running on powerbank like some of the ones I have outside do.

Another way to test it is use it as a dashcam. Just don’t connect to any wifi at the time. Of course you’ll have to set it up on your 2G first but once that’s done you can move it anywhere. Several people I know have a spare V2 they use while driving all day on the job. It just won’t upload to the cloud so you have to look at your SD card when not on the internet.

624

Yes, I have done this also.

  1. both the cams and the device watching the cams have to be on the same WiFi network, and

  2. both have to had authenticated with Wyze before losing internet access

So if you arrive at a location where the internet is down, but you have a phone (or tablet) with cellular data, the phone can authenticate itself with Wyze and then view any pre-authenticated cams when it connects to the same WiFi network as the cams.

Or you can obviously use the phone as a hotspot to allow the cams to authenticate. But on some phones you have to then turn off the hotspot once the cams authenticate so that the phone will use its WiFi radio to connect to the local WiFi in a normal fashion and see the cams.

625

It’s just that the app talks to your cameras directly across your local WiFi - it always does that when it can.

Funny that I omitted Xiaomi from my earlier list of existing “edge AI” vendors. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
626

hmmm, guess I should have joined the forum sooner?

My cameras came with the xnor firmware, not sure how a date on a newsletter is the determining factor given what I bought was advertised as having a certain feature… But aside from all that, whether you got the email or not, until it was posted there was plenty of talk regarding PD being free once developed.

Just my 2 cents.

7 Likes
627

I just purchased an Eufy 2K indoor camera for $40 to replace my Wyze camera that I just bought less than a month ago. Eufy doesn’t charge a subscription for PD. The camera overall is much better than Wyze, the only thing I miss is being able to use IFTTT. My plan is to just use my Wyze as a webcam.

1 Like
628

Await your further report.
I’ve ordered 2K Xiaomi cameras.
As far as IFTTT is concerned Wize will no doubt start charging for it soon as I’m now paying a subscription to SONOFF for continued IFTTT use as They are being charged by ITTT.

629

No kidding? I’ve never used IFTTT but thought it was generally free.

2 Likes
630

Welcome to the wonderful world of SAAS.

Storage and processing costs money (even if a few cents) and someone is paying the bill. Generally, if it’s free, you’re the product and once they aren’t making enough money selling your info and habits they introduce a subscription fee.

4 Likes
631

You don’t have to tell me. :frowning:

I’ve been beating that drum a long time. I’m looking forward to getting HomeAssistant configured one day.

3 Likes