Camera motion detection without event recording

Wishlist Maybe Later
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1

I have a staircase that is illuminated with a Wyze bulb. At the bottom of the staircase I have a Wyze cam. I also have another Wyze cam at the top of the staircase. I’ve set up an automation to turn on the bulb when cam motion is detected at the bottom of the staircase. Then turn off the bulb when cam motion is detected at the top of the staircase.

The problem is this automation only works if the cam has event recording turned on. And it only triggers the automation after the video uploads to the server, which can take around 10 seconds.

The automation does not trigger when I have event recording turned off. I choose to leave on motion detection on these cams, but turn off event recording, because they are in sensitive areas.

Now you may be asking me why I don’t just get the Wyze Sense. 1) I already have multiple spare cams lying around and didn’t want to shell out money for the Sense, which is basically just a Cam with weaker capabilities. 2) I don’t like the fact that the Sense is battery powered and I have to change the batteries every year like I have to do with smoke detectors before they start chirping and waking you up in the middle of the night.

So I am requesting that the developers allow motion detection WITHOUT event recording to trigger automation events. The UI in the automation setup clearly states “when cam detects motion”. It does not even mention event recording, therefore it should not mandate it.

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This is not going to be possible due to the way camera motion detection is processed. My suggestion would be to get a Wyze Sense motion sensor, which can accomplish this for you.

1 Like
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@Loki is it possible to change the software to just send a boolean to the server saying that the Cam detected the motion? The software is currently coded to have an entire uploaded 15 second video to trigger an automation. But surely software can be modified.

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@tokyotech,

Possible, certainly. However, given how the infrastructure is set up and given the availability of motion sensors, I don’t think this is likely something that Wyze is going to consider. (n.b., I’m not a Wyze employee.)

That said, I have generalize the title of this topic a bit and moved it over to the #wishlist. Keep an eye on it to see if it gets tagged as “maybe later” or “probably not”. That will be your answer as to whether it may ever be considered.