Greetings!
I wanted to know if there are any magic spells to address battery cam pro’s network connection process. The setup:
- TP-Link Deco mesh network with a bunch of nodes
- A dozen Wyze cams mostly window cams, bulb cams, and a few V4’s. Plus two wired doorbells and the dark sheep of the family, two battery cam pro’s.
- Network connection to the pros is absolutely pitiful. 15-20 sec on a dedicated 2.4 GHz wifi and WPA 2.
- Battery cams show one WiFi bar 30 feet away from a Deco mesh node behind a window. Two panes of glass. No bricks or anything like that.
- A V4 next to it is 2-3 bars and connects instantly. The battery cams, 20 sec.
- I have disabled power saving mode.
- The time to connect is inconsistent. Once in a while it will connect we within 2-3 sec most of the time 15-20.
Any suggestions? I’m happy i paid $20 each at Home Depot otherwise I’d be fuming.
Where is the H.D. that you paid $20 for your BCP’s. The best I got was $71 for a 2 pack on a Special Buy deal with military discount.
The BCP’s are notorious for staying around 2 bars on wifi. I have 4 of them and also Deco Mesh 6e with 3 nodes. I don’t rely on the auto assignment to the node with the best signal. I go into the individual cams in the mesh and reassign the node to what I measure as the closest geographically. You stated “dedicated IoT network” which I also set up separately in addition to the combined 2.4/5g in the Deco. You could also use the Guest Network if you don’t need it for guest specifically. The BCP’s are operable on the 5g band which you might try connecting them to for better results. You can also toggle off Power Saving Mode to improve the delayed livestream. This will effect your battery usage unless you have wired them or have solar panel setups. Performance is better if the batteries are always charged to 100% which solar panels are good at doing. Wired removes the battery as a component since they are not needed.
Based on forum comments prior to buying my BCP’s, I decided only battery power was not the way to go. Wyze claim of 6 months operation on battery is highly exaggerated unless the cams do literally nothing but on demand livestream.
Post if you make any changes based on my comments and experiences.
Home Depot had a crazy sale a few months ago, two BCP for $39. At that price point it’s a curiosity item. My IoT network is on the Deco guest net but i did notice some rather fishy assignments, like very far away. I’ll force them to the obvious node and hope for the best.
I do get about a month battery life with power saver enabled. Not bad. I’ll keep y’all posted! Thank you for your reply!
May not have been a sale here in the northeast or an email notice I failed to take notice of or open. I would have bought several more and had my roof littered with solar panels, lol. Recently found a deal on Amazon ($13.29) for 5w/5v usb-c solar panel with an almost 24" extension pole. That will keep the panel above the snow on the roof in the winter. It is advertised as being for Ring cams but is working great on my BCP’s.
If you have high activity around the cams, that month for the battery will be much less if you turn off power saving. Good luck with the node reassignments.
I reassigned the two BCP to use a specific node in the mesh network. That helped a little. I added SD cards so that when it wakes up and starts recording it goes to local storage. Small improvement.
Fishy observation. The BCP report 1 bar 30 feet and thru a window from their assigned node. The mesh node reports 2 or 3 (out of three).
I’m leaning towards buying an outdoor mesh node. Other things could use it.
I rechecked my BCP’s after reading your post and the results were mixed. All are on solar panels, but not the Wyze brand.
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BCP 1 - 3 bars on wifi, outside, 1 exterior wall and higher than node location.
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BCP 2 - 1 bar on wifi, outside, 2 interior 1 exterior walls and slightly higher than node location. I may reassign.
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BCP 3 - 2 bars on wifi, inside a shed, 2 interior 2 exterior walls with about 10 yards of open space between house and shed. Slightly higher than node location.
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BCP 4 - 2 bars on wifi, back side of shed, 2 interior 3 exterior walls with about 13 yards of open space from house to back of shed. Slightly higher than node location.
I’ll make the reassignment for #2 and hope for better results. Usually takes a day or 2 for network to readjust. I’m staying with IoT network but may switch a couple to 5ghz band to compare results and performance.
latest update.
BCP now has an SD card and is assigned to the best mesh node. 2 out of 3 bars on the BCP, 3 on the mesh node.
Connecting to watch a live event still takes 15-20 sec and often disconnects or reports device offline. 50% of events aren’t watchable off the cloud. Trying to access device SD card results in frequent “No SD card installed” which get cleared by rebooting.
This is rather infuriating because it can’t be that difficult to do any of those. At my old job we did nearly all the functionality of the BCP, incorporated camera, WiFi and cellular, and cloud, and worked flawlessly (automotive industry) 8 years ago.
To summarize:
- Connection is not reliable at all
- If and when it connects it takes an extraordinary amount of time to actually connect and stream.
- No reason why half the events are not saved but give errors.
- No reason why the SD card is often reported as missing.
My 4 BCP’s are all on solar panels. I have no issues with cloud playback/viewing of events. Have cam unlimited annual subscription. I have never had sdcard recognition issues with any of my BCP’s. Sdcard playback is dismal thru the cam. Events are showing as detected and recorded but no active green lines/bars. If I advance back to the event I can see an image underneath but cannot get it to actively play. I basically rely on cloud viewing of events. I’ll eventually pull sdcard from one and load it on my computer. I admit that I am seeing playback issues that did not exist when they were new.
I’ve turned off power saving on 2 and set for no cooldown and 20 second recordings. The solar panels keep tbe batteries at 100% so I’m not concerned about the usage messages that pop up.
As another user stated in a previous conversation, these were not ready for prime time.
We have another issue that seems inherent with battery powered cameras. Latency of detection and recording.
I need something that starts recording relatively fast, because the amount of time available is maybe 10 seconds. Being the embedded systems software developer that I am i set up a Window Cam to look at the same zone as the BCP.
The WC detects and records instantly, the moment a vehicle or person enters the field of view. The BCP only starts recording halfway, and only vehicles. Rarely person’s.
What I’m guessing is happening is that smart detection is triggered at the cloud. That is, the BCP has to first connect (any good reason you can’t leave it connected?) Then the cloud has to do the smart detection and tell the camera to start recording. That’s a round trip of 20 sec minimum by which time it’s too late.
If this is the case a BCP is absolutely not usable in security situations. This should be very easy to verify via system logs and timestamps.
Your prospective on the Wyze cams cloud dependency for smart events performance is accurate. Actually, the announcements thru Alexa to my echo via AWP (the cloud source) is far better than the BCP’s live recordings and notifications.
Preliminary results are very promising since turning off power saving and changing to no cooldown. Not recommended if just on battery power. Response is better and sdcard recording has improved. However, pet detection and notification is not happening even though recorded. Another smart event, i.e. person or vehicle has to be present to trigger activity reporting.
I will continue monitoring performance but from what I surmise, any changes to improve the BCP performance are battery killers. Wired or solar is the only way or put them in storage.