2 Hardware requests & 1 Feature request from a Network consultant

I have been a Network Consultant for many years working with enterprise equipment for many clients. First I will say I love the Wyze product and what it brings to the residential and potentially business customer. For my home I use a number of products ranging between $20-$200 and for clients they easily go beyond that. What Wyze offers is fantastic though there is room for improvement. Here are my suggestions to take to your engineers to make Wyze products even better.

  1. Failure Detection & Reboot
    I’ve been testing the Wyze cameras for a couple months now and sometimes they do disconnect and require a power cycle. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, especially one one in point#2, but it would be good to code an auto-reboot if the camera detects a failure to connect with your external server after a period of time. (assuming it’s not frozen)

  2. Devices for 5Ghz
    I understand the camera devices are sourced from a particular manufacturer that doesn’t have 5Ghz radios in their cameras so this will require a little more doing however let me explain the important of 5Ghz vs 2.4Ghz. 2.4Ghz has become unreliable in today’s world due the over-saturation of 2.4Ghz networks, interfering devices like Microwaves and misconfigurations leading to extreme channel overlap/interference. A lot of this is completely out of control. If your neighbors don’t stick to non-overlapping channels, 1,6 or 11, there is nothing you can do and they can take up a considerable amount of air-time of the wireless spectrum especially if they decide to use 40Mhz channel width (really dumb idea at 2.4 fyi). 5Ghz has potentially 23 non-overlapping channels at 20Mhz, or 12 at 40Mhz. Keep in mind anything overlapping on the same channel has to take turns talking, that’s problem#1. If they are talking on the same channel, they will try to talk over each other causing excessive packet retries, problem#2. As you can see the 2.4Ghz is prone with problems unless you live in a house, with your neighbors far away and you don’t own microwave ovens haha.

I’ve worked with many 2.4Ghz cameras where they would stop communicating after a nearby microwave was turned on which required them to power cycle once in a while. Again this can be completely out of your control in an office environment, where the adjacent office has a lunch room on the other side of the wall. I found in such situations the 2.4Ghz product to be worthless and to be honest as a security measure it’s easy to disrupt the signal on this frequency so ultimately it’s a poor choice for such task.

It’s good to keep a 2.4Ghz product for the low cost aspect, but I would highly suggest investing in a 5Ghz product to have the more security minded customers interested.

  1. Temperature Monitor Device
    As Wyze is exploring other devices to add to their arsenal, I suggest a temperature monitor. Wyze has added more of the home automation features as of late and something that is lacking in the industry is a home automation process monitoring room temperature. Such devices would be cheap, Sonoff has some but not implemented well in my opinion. Temperature monitors can trigger actions to enable heaters, humidifiers, etc on a per room basis or occupancy or just talk with the home thermostat. There are many possibilities here.

Anyway that’s all what I have for now. I love the product and I plan to watch it grow over the coming years.

Welcome to the community, @vulcan4d!I think you will find many of your requests are already either in #wishlist or #roadmap. I have provided you with links below on how to search those categories. I have also included links on how to use the Wishlist and Roadmap. Requests for new features are done via the #wishlist category. :slight_smile:

Search Wishlist (enter your search word/s after #wishlist in the search box)
Search Roadmap (enter your search word/s after #roadmap in the search box)

Please read through How to Use the Wishlist and How to Read the Roadmap.