Sensors Offline? Try this

I’d have posted this to “Tips and Tricks”, but it doesn’t get much traffic.

So, this tip applies to several situations with Wyze-sense setups. And, like all things Wyze, it may or may not work for you, because of the incredible mish-mash of hardware and software versions, firmware revisions, etc., that make up the grand beta test we’ve all been doing for Wyze, so caveat emptor.

What I’ve found is that with my v2 Wyze Cam, if you unplug it from power, insert the sense bridge, then power on, the camera comes up fine, all looks good in the app, you can see the bridge, etc., but the bridge does not fully boot, and you end up with a solid yellow light. This results in your existing sensors all going offline, and the bridge is unresponsive when you try to add new devices. Same thing is true if there’s a power failure. Camera will reboot fine, bridge won’t. Happened this afternoon to me.

It’s easy to forget to check if the bridge shows a solid blue light, especially if all looks good in the app. FWIW, I’m on Android, running 2.12, and while there’s an option in the app to reboot the camera, there is NOT an option to independently reboot the bridge. What about the bridge button? According to the changelog, the last firmware revision disabled the button functionality. I haven’t checked it, but I suspect that rebooting the camera when you have a solid yellow light on the bridge won’t fix the problem. Try it and post a reply if you find it works.

So, what’s the tip? Remove the bridge from the camera. Boot the camera first, and when it’s fully booted (solid blue), plug the bridge in. That’s it. It’ll boot fine and go through to solid blue, and your sensors will be back online, and you can add new devices. It seems that the bridge needs the camera to be fully booted before it starts it’s own boot process.

Like I said before, this may or may not work for you due to the variation in HW, SW, and firmware. If it does, glad to help.

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I can envision perhaps cutting up a USB cable to isolate the power from the bridge socket, and splitting it off so that a Wyze plug can control a separate USB power supply to energize the bridge’s connection to the camera only on demand. It just might work.

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Someone did just that…
Split USB Cable

Sep '19
@Infamousadmin, you cracked it. And, inspired by your solution, I found a way to shunt extra power to the bridge that doesn’t require soldering or splicing. I ordered this power-splitting USB Y-cable from Amazon (Amazon.com 40) and connected the Wyze sensor bridge to the USB3 female port, then plugged the male USB3-A end into the CamPan and the male USB2-A end into a two-port, 3-amp USB power adapter. The CamPan power cable is connected to the second port on the power adapter. With this setup, the bridge and camera draw clean power separately from the DC adapter, but the bridge can still pass data to the camera.
As a bonus, having the bridge hanging a couple feet below the camera and not changing orientation as the camera pans seems to stabilize its radio connection to the sensors.
After connecting up everything and re-adding several sensors, it’s all been running for a week now, through multiple power cycles of the camera, without losing connection to any of the sensors!
So we have now pretty definitively demonstrated that Wyze cameras (at least the CamPan) have a design or manufacturing flaw in how they provide power to the sensor bridge. Work around that flaw, and the system operates reliably.

Chas

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Excellent tip!

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