The process of making the Outdoor Cam

I know that Wyze has been working on the Outdoor for over 2 years, and they had Alpha & Beta testers.

Out of all those Alpha & Beta testers, did none of them tell Wyze that this design was just bad?

For example, this is a 100% throwaway device once the batteries have died. There is no option at all to replace them.

Why not add the needed circuitry to have always on power to bypass the batteries?
Why not a replaceable battery pack? They could have offered bigger battery packs as well.
Why not have a dual powered option, and no the IP65 rating is just an excuse that they don’t have it. Wyze could have easily designed hardware that has a pigtail with a connector that is water tight.

The first delay for the Outdoor cam was told to us

The main challenge has come from motion detection. Using our standard motion detection algorithm would kill a stand-alone battery in a couple of days. This meant we had to implement a new PIR based triggering mechanism (a sensor that detects radiant heat emitted from an object). Although this is pretty easy indoors, it has turned out to be much harder dealing with wind, sun, and everything that comes with the great outdoors.

For the last year, we’ve dedicated top-tier talent and max resources to meet our goal to launch in 2019. However, after our recent round of hardware testing this month, we’re making the decision to push the launch to early 2020.

So, it STILL fails as can be seen by the tons of posts both here and on reddit and on reviews.

At some point in this process, Wyze should have started over, and listen to customers & testers that just wanted a battery powered V2 with replaceable batteries. Other companies have done this, and many are moving on to Eufy and others now.

I sure hope Wyze has a V3 with updated hardware that is coming this year, if not, well, more & more people will not bother with the outdated hardware that Wyze is selling and go with the better hardware that is out there.

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Interesting post. I think this is also evidence of the downside of providing “subscription-free” cloud services with the cameras. If Wyze had a mandatory subscription model all along, there might have been enough of an ongoing revenue cushion to allow them the luxury of more time to get the WCO right. But the idea of selling out hundreds of thousands of new cameras to existing customers must have been a hell of a motivator to get to market.

These cameras trigger too late, I have sent multiple video recordings, eventually they replaced the camera with a new one with the same issue.

Useless products (I have few of their cameras)