Would it be possible to add the ability within the app to turn the power to the extra USB port on and off? I’m thinking it could be useful for low powered USB light, acting as a smart nightlight.
I have no inside hardware design knowledge, but I suspect that the two ports are probably hardwired together.
Thanks for the reply. Maybe that can be an added feature on a future version.
When I was a kid, I saved up my money for a “do it all” pocket knife which I thought would be great, until I tried to use it.
Wouldn’t a pack of 4 automatic LED night lights for $6 be more practical?
If you send me some RMA duds, I could look at it and tell you if the ports are wired together or not.
I’ve tried very hard to power-control usb myself before, on gnu-linux systems, and I don’t believe most chipsets support it.
I’d be more interested in being able to plug a usb storage device in there, to use as an alternative to micro sd cards for folks who have bucket load of old usb memory sticks.
Would love for the USB to read/Write data but i am sure that will require a different board and will drive the price of the camera up. I was more hoping for software to be a solution but that also depends on the current board and its configuration. If the usb could be cycled on/off like we are able to with night vision, it could be useful for many different applications. The only one i can really think of right now is added lighting, as it draws very little power.
This might sound odd but hear me out, there are usb powered cree headlights for bikes that put out over 1000 Lumens, are waterproof and very cheap. If you have a camera mounted by a window or even outside, you could add one of those lights with very little effort. The lights cover quite a large area, its not needed for the camera but its a great security feature to have in your home. If you were ever out later than planed, get home to a dark house and ended up tripping over something or experienced something of that nature, this would help. Those lights usually draw less than 500mah. I believe the charging block for the camera puts out about 1000mah and the camera draws about 500mah, Give or take. So a powered usb light would be fine to use.
I dont have a diagram, nor do i want to take apart my camera. If it can be done, sweet. if not… oh well.
Thanks for the input anthony.suchit! I do believe RickO is correct however, and the two are connected. This would prevent you from using independent device in this port, at least for an ‘on/off’ scenario. I do know they are considering doing a couple of cool things with the USB port in the future, but I don’t have any specific information about this other than that. We do take all input seriously though, even if it isn’t possible on this current version of the camera demand can help us make choices for future versions. I compile things like this and present them all to the Dev team, just in case it is something we want to pursue.
We will likely not use it for USB storage devices however, since the firmware does only supports FAT32 which has a 32GB limit. I know it has come up pretty frequently that some users are using larger cards, these run exFAT. Its close enough our camera’s see it, but it is unreliable. I have been doing some long term testing with a 64GB personally, and it has a bad habit of dropping data from time to time, meaning if it was in an important location I may end up losing something.
Let me know if you have any other questions or suggestions!
Edit: Some formatting
Can you share with us where you heard 32GB was the maximum filesystem size supported by a fat32 filesystem?
Sorry, had to redo this post because I misread the first time! I did speak in error earlier. It is not the ‘maximum’ support size, but it is to my understanding that it becomes less stable to larger the partition size. Again, to my understanding this is why system like Windows will default to exFAT once you have gone over a 32GB partition size. I know it is possible to force larger FAT32 partitions but my experience with them has not been stable enough to use over exFAT.
I asked because I was administering information systems a couple decades ago, before NTFS was in wide use. Windows computers in that time had fat32 filesystems all the time. Fat16 was sometimes used, and fat12 was even a thing. Used in Floppy disks if I recall right. exfat had not been invented then. Yet hard drives 80 and 160GB were common, and filesystem corruption was extremely rare if not caused by an underlying failure of the hard drive itself.
Fat32 should reliably support up to 2TB volumes. The biggest ‘problem’ I can think of with it is the 4GB file size limitation, but that shouldn’t be a problem with WyzeCam. And perhaps another problem is if windos and mac use the xfat variant over fat32 without telling people when they format SD cards. That should be easily overcome by formatting the card while it is inside the WyzeCam instead of formatting it in a desktop computer.
I’m interested in helping get to the bottom of why fat32 is less stable larger than 32GB and fixing that. What kernel version does the latest Wyzecam v2 firmware use? I want to see if the fat32 driver has been patched in the kernel’s upstream in a way that might fix this. I could then share with you a patch to incorporate the fix into your firmware images. Or if the bug exists in upstream, I’d report it to them.
Either way, you get the fix, for free, and you don’t have to write it; just roll it into your next beta FW build.