USB power?

Cameras
1

could one use a USB rechargeable battery pack to power for a couple hours?
This would be handy as a cyclist safety camera.

2

@fritz,

Yes- you can use a USB battery pack. The V2 camera draws about 300 mA, slightly more at night when the night-vision IR leds are on. I have a portable battery pack that holds 6000 mAh. It will power the camera for about 20 hours.

You have to first set up the camera (at home) and configure it for continuous recording to the SD card (or motion-detect recording, if that will meet your cycling requirement). Subsequently, when you power it up from the USB pack, it will start recording as per the configuration, and continue to record for as long as the battery lasts. Note that camera won’t know what time it is when it boots up with the USB power pack. It will initialize using the time it had when it was last powered down. As a result, the time stamp on the recordings will be incorrect.

 

3

excellent.! thanks very.

4

If having accurate time on the recordings is important, you can power up the cam while at home (in range of your WiFi) using the battery pack. It will connect to your WiFi and obtain current time from the internet. Then pick up the cam + battery and take it out to your bike. However, if you power it up somewhere else (when not in range of your WiFi), it won’t be able to connect to the internet and hence won’t know what time it is.

5

could one share ones cell connect via wifi and therefore internet to the Wyze for time?

6

@fritz,

Absolutely, but there’s a small bit of finesse required. Here’s how I do this using the Personal Hotspot in my iPhone:

  1. activate hotspot
  2. using my iPad (equipped with the Wyze app), connect to the iPhone's hotspot
  3. power up the Wyze cam using the USB battery pack. Press the reset button to put it into set-up mode
  4. launch the Wyze app on the iPad and go through the 'add new cam' procedure, connecting the cam to the hotspot.
  5. once that's done, you can use the app (on the iPad) to configure the cam as desired: record to SD card, etc. Turn off Motion Detection option, unless you want the cam to use your cellphone data plan to send 15-second video clips to the cloud.
  6. Now that the cam is set up, you can turn off the hotspot, power down the cam, etc.
Subsequently, when you want to use the cam on your bike or other 'remote' location:
  1. activate hotspot on iPhone.
  2. power up the cam with the USB battery pack. Wait a minute or so for it to boot up.
  3. The blue status light comes on to indicate that the cam is on-line (through the hotspot). At this point, it will have obtained current time over the internet (from an NTP server).
  4. Now you can turn off the hotspot. In a minute or so, the blue status light will start blinking, warning that the cam is 'off-line'. However it's still running and will be doing either continuous record or motion-triggered record to the SD card, depending on how you configured it. Note - even though you turned off the Motion Detection setting in step 5 above, the cam will still record motion-triggered clips (minimum of 1 minute long) to the SD card.
I've used this scheme to set up the camera to record in remote locations. I temporarily put it on-line via hotspot (so it can get the time), then leave it unattended for hours. It will keep recording as long as the battery lasts.
1 Like
7

I like it, good clear instructions

 

Flaco