Power Cycle From Afar?

I have a V2 in my vacation home in California and for the last few days it has said it is Offline. Is there any way to cycle the power from where I am right now (Canada)? The other two cameras are working fine and we have no way to get any one to cycle the power for us. The camera was only installed in February so I would not think that it should have any issues.

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Without contact to the camera, the only way would be with a smart plug like WeMo. I would highly recommend a smart plug from somebody on every remote camera, like in vacation homes.

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I have my Camera wired to my outside spotlight, the spot light is on a TP Link WIFI Switch. It works great.

Couldn’t Wyze program a feature into the actual camera where if it cannot heartbeat (keep a live connection) with the internet after x amount of tries or time it automatically reboots itself?

I was gonna post it in wishlist but its there already, vote for it:

Actually, I believe they just removed that because it interfered with off-line use of the camera. I think it had a watchdog set to reboot the camera after 90 minutes, which created enough other problems with users for them to remove it.

I guess you could make the feature selectable by customers just like any other inside the app, that would fix the issue with offline users

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Yes, making it optional would be acceptable. But from the complaints I’ve seen there is no indication it worked when it was in the camera. It just interfered with off-line users. A hard reboot is better than a soft reboot, so a WiFi switch is still highly desirable in far-away locations IMO.

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Well then Wyze better hurry up and make a WiFi plug!! :smile:

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Hmmm, well, this was the first time (since feb) I ever had to hard reboot it and I know I’ve had internet issues before as logged by my NAS. Not sure if it was because they removed it since I wasn’t aware until now but it would be nice to test it out and see.

Rebooting spontaneously interferes with a lot of legitimate applications where the cameras don’t have permanent connection to the internet. The cams can be used for recording continuously to SD card, recording motion-triggered clips to the SD card, and capturing time-lapse sequences to SD card. None of these require internet connectivity. The entire rationale behind integrating the SD card in the cameras was to enable local recording.

If I could down-vote the proposal in the Wish list, I would. Better that Wyze improve the core robustness and resiliency of the camera firmware than depend on watchdog timers to reboot.

This is easily fixed by making it an option you can enable inside the app :slight_smile:

Oh and afaik “motion-triggered clips” do not work without an internet connection, only continuous recording to the SD card.

Yet another option in the app is not required. If Event Recording is disabled (i.e, no 12-second recording to the cloud, no event notifications sent to the cloud), the camera can deduce that internet connectivity is not required.

A much better solution is to improve the robustness of the camera firmware so that it doesn’t have to be rebooted. If necessary, individual processes could be watchdogged and restarted.

True, that should work and yes, making it more robust would be better but afaik some internet connectivity issues like packet loss for extended amount of time is hard to troubleshoot for and is what sometimes drives things connected to your network crazy.

When you do get it back up and running again you could always setup an IFTTT to automatically run a daily/weekly/fortnightly restart on your WyzeCam.

I have mine set to restart every week and I’ve never had any lockups or problems with it in the 9+months it’s been running.

It was REALLY easy to do too. I made sure my WyzeCam and phone were on the same WiFi signal then loaded the IFTTT app on my phone,
I choose IF as “Date & Time” then selected a day and time for it to occur. Next I set THAT to “WyzeCam” and selected restart device.
A few seconds of time and a weekly restart was setup! :smiley::+1:

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I’ve not found the need to do it (probably because all my cams are local), but you can now schedule camera restarts on any combination of days a week using Wyze app shortcuts too.

As I said… I am trying to re-start from afar so this would not work.
It looks like the only sure way for this particular issue may be to use an external wifi switchable power supply as even the camera schedule re-start may not work if the camera freezes up and does not do the re-start…

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Yes, I think a smart plug like a (WeMo or equiv) is your most robust chance of recovering a remote cam under the widest set of circumstances.

Seems to be an issue/problem with out of state cameras for us that use them for vacation homes. Annoying. Hope Wyze can fiqure it out.

When it’s disconnected there’s no way to communicate with the cam.

Your best bet is to power through a WiFi plug like a wemo,

Alternatively, you could get a basic timer plug that powers off / on daily, or weekly say at 2am Monday morn.

I have three in a remote area of Oklahoma - one is using a Ravpower as a miniUPS.

It quit working for a week or so until the power went off Monday when the Tornadoes hit Oklahoma - and when it came back my camera came back online.

I tried a wemo on the router itself. Unfortunately, the wemo requires an internet connection to see it’s schedule.

So once it turned power off to the router, it never came back on.

Other devices might be a little more local programming - but this wouldn’t be a problem for using with the camera.

Use a wemo or a timer to regularly reboot it.