I was playing with my Wyze camera V4, and trying to set up automation to have it turned on at a certain time of the day and shut off at a certain time of the day. It doesn’t look like this is possible. Am I wrong?
With the Cam V4 you can set up a schedule automation and set the action for the schedule to be “Turn on the camera” or “Turn off the camera”. These are valid options / actions for the V4 Camera.
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Very easy as others have pointed out. Just worth noting that there is no true “off”. Cam is still powered on and reachable, and theoretically hackable. If it is a privacy concern, you might want to add some smart plugs to the mix. Still have the cam power on and off with the app (which should help ensure the SD card doesn’t get corrupted if you’re using one) then hard power it off a couple minutes before/after the times of the automation. Plug power on 7:55AM, cam power on 8AM, cam power off 9PM, plug power off 9:05PM etc.
I’m not certain but the plug powering on may turn the camera on too so that part of the automation won’t actually do anything if that’s the case, but no biggie.
I haven’t tried this setup but that’s what I would try if I wanted the cam truly off during certain times.
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Just being devil’s advocate here, I haven’t had an SD card get corrupted whenever I use a smart plug to power on or off a camera. I used to have all my cameras on a schedule some time ago and no corruption of any of the SD cards. Also, dash cams constantly have their power cut off and the cards don’t get corrupted. In my opinion force ejecting the SD card will probably corrupt the card but cutting power to it might be unlikely. Just my two cents.
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Dash cams have a battery or supercapacitor to prevent it. Mine complete the write before powering off (they denote that with a different colored light that lasts about 5 seconds after powering the car off). I had to replace the batteries a few years ago as they no longer had enough for that ~5 seconds (super cheap tiny LiPo batteries), and the cards would get corrupted and lose my settings.
Any time you stop an SD card from writing when it is in the middle of it, you’ll at least get a corrupt file, but risk the whole file system getting corrupted. Depends what point it its at in the write, if it is right when it is creating the file or finishing/closing it, that’s the worst. Probably depends on usage scenario, if you’re doing constant recording, there is basically once a minute when it is really bad to shut it down. If event only, then only at the start/end of the event recording.
I’d definitely recommend taking steps to try and “gracefully” stop the recording as eventually it will bite you, especially if someone is automating it to happen every day or multiple times a day.
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Now that you mentioned it, I remember one of my dash cams had a small lithium battery. My new one I guess has a capacitor 
I am not disputing any of the above, I’m just saying that I never had an issue. Whenever any of my cams drop the connection I hard reboot them with a smart plug. Maybe I’ve been lucky and they’re not recording at the time when I do that. I remember when I had the crapy DSL I had all four of my V3s set to reboot at 3:00AM every day. Who knows, maybe the V3s are more robust 
If you have continuous recording I suppose you have a 59/60 chance (or maybe slightly worse) of rebooting it at an “ok” time. You’ll lose the file it is currently writing but generally the card should be ok. I’d be concerned what happens when the cam tries to overwrite that corrupt file though.
If possible to avoid doing it, it is a good idea, if not possible, generally worst case should be that you see an error about the card and have to format it and reboot the cam again (hopefully via software reboot this time). I suppose if it is bad enough and the internal formatter can’t figure it out, might have to pull the card and put in a PC. Though “safe eject” followed by a reboot might also wake it up.
Knock on wood, no issues so far. Mind you, haven’t had the need to hard reboot any of my cams for a long time now. Power outages at the cottage are totally different story though and way out of my control. I just hope by writing all of this I haven’t jinxed my cams 
Yeah you’re screwed now.
Thanks! With your kind guidance I got that sorted. I kept trying to “select the camera” as a first step which was really “adding a new camera” and got me in the wrong workflow.
With your encouragement, I went slower, read the screen more carefully, and noted my mistake and selected “add automation” which got me in the right workflow.
Thank you.
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