Sensor Gateway Backup (Redundancy)

I’ve noticed Wyze Sense doesn’t always report events like it should.

I PROPOSE: To improve event delivery, that every sensor gateway report to the cloud every event that it can hear on RF.

Today, a sensor gateway only reports the events of devices to which it is ‘paired’.

Pairing is a logical process for user administration and managing security. Pairing should not be required, actually, just for delivering messages from a sensor to Wyze’ cloud.

SOME BACKSTORY:
To improve my own reliability of Wyze Sense events, I’ve invested in three gateways, and three sets of sensors. (Three sensors on every door, and window). I’m going to set up three unrelated Wyze accounts, and three seperate IFTTT accounts to process and forward these events to my smarthome hub, and then if less than all three events arrive at my hub within 10 seconds of eachother, I will trigger an alert that one of the gateways must be down. And then I realised… Wyze could do close to this, with a change to how their software works, and people wouldn’t have to buy as much hardware.

You’d still want two gateways and two sensors per door, but if both gateways received and uploaded all events, then the cloud could detect when events are getting lost, and determine if it was a bad gateway or sensor based on if it was all events or just some that are lost on a given gateway.

The pairing process should thusly be modified. Instead of pairing a sensor to a gateway, you should pair it to your ‘account’.

  1. User clicks plus in app, to add a new device.
  2. They choose motion or door sensor.
  3. Instead of selecting a cam to connect sensor to, Wyze skips past that screen, and instead, in the cloud, starts paying attention to ANY new sensors being added to any wyzebridge on that user’s account.
  4. When it sees the new sensor mac address, that sensor mac address is linked to the wyze account of the user whos bridge detected it if that user was the same user who clicked + device in their app moments earlier

RISKS: If two users (neighbors) were pairing sensors, at the same time, they might pair eachother’s sensors. BUT this can already happen today if the two person’w GWs and sensors are within the same RF area. The RF area would be a little larger potentially for anyone with multiple GWs. But this is a small price to pay for the benefit.

The cloud would receive two events for every activation of a sensor. If the events already are transmitted from the sensors with a nonce, then deduplication is trivial. If not, then some state information may need to be maintained in the cloud, (a bit for each sensor) so that a opening event for a door that is already opened, can be discarded reliably.

BENEFIT: Enhanced reliability of Sense event delivery. Enhanced user confidence in product. Tamper-resistance. Continued function when a battery fails. Ability to confidently report a failed battery or failed sensor.

@moderators Please consider forwarding to internal bug tracker.