My roommate unplugged my cameras from charging and the light is purple not blue. Was trying to contact it since it said offline. So I deleted the device off my phone to reset it up. The purple light won’t go away. Can’t set it up again
I think you just bricked your cam by deleting it while it was offline. There is an anti-theft feature, where if you delete a camera from your account while it is offline, it assumes it was stolen and locks it up so the thief can never sell it or activate it.
I am not sure there is anything you can do about it now. 
carverofchoice - If I have a camera that I can’t get back online, how do I fix the problem if I can’t delete it and set it up again? I guess I should set it up again without deleting it? Can I do that? Does it work? Just asking for a friend… 
That is exactly correct. You keep trying to set it up without deleting it. I have had this happen a few times, and sometimes it gets fixed on my first attempt to set it up again, but there have been a few times that I had to try multiple times in different ways before I fixed mine. The key is that you can’t delete the camera while it shows as offline, and you have to try to set it back up to the same Base station it was on before because it is locked to that one.
Once you get the camera back online, then you can safely delete it while it connected and online. You just can’t delete it while it offline or it triggers the theft protection lockup procedure.
Yes. It absolutely works. I have had to do it a few times with my V1 over the last several years. It seems to happen to me occasionally when I let my WCO v1 go down to a fully dead battery while streaming.
Thanks for the clarification. I have a V2 that I setup as a hummingbird camera. After a day or two, it went offline. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Nope. I cleared cache and logged out. Logged back in. Nope. Etc, etc, etc. I did not want to delete it and set it up as new. So I just went thru the setup steps and named it “Hum” vs “Hummingbird” like it was originally. Works great.
Here’s the question. It seems to have replaced my Hummingbird camera because it no longer exists, and Hum is in the same order as Hummingbird was. How did it know I was replacing the existing Hummingbird camera with the “new” Hum camera? Does the camera have a unique number of some sort so Wyze can tell it’s the same camera?
That is correct, it can tell it is the same exact camera. I believe it uses the “MAC ADDRESS” number in this case.
If you open the camera and click the settings gear icon on the top right, then go to “Device Info,” you will see a section called “MAC” which is used by your network, and presumably by Wyze as a [hopefully/should-be] unique identifier.
In theory, there are other potential things Wyze could track instead to ensure they have this unique, specific camera, but I am guessing they are mostly tracking the MAC address.
When you go through Setup, it sees you are setting up the camera again, and it just renames the old camera to the new name you just set during setup. Sometimes, on some devices, when you do this, it will even keep a bunch of the old settings you previously had set so you don’t have to redo everything! That is really convenient.
Yes, you’re correct. A MAC address is a unique identifier.
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In theory and original intent, yes…but in practice there are some interesting points worth noting over the last few years that I’ll explain why I used the language I did saying “hopefully/should-be unique” instead of “definitely is unique”…I have seen evidence that MAC addresses are no longer actually globally unique anymore. However, it is said that MACs do not need to be globally unique anymore as long as they are unique within each L2 (broadcast) domain. So there actually are now many cases where 2 NICs connected to 2 different networks can share the same MAC address without causing any problems, they just can’t be on the same network at the same time, and not everyone internationally is respecting the MAC registry and some have been issuing devices with otherwise used/assigned MAC ranges (especially some countries/companies). To say nothing of all the spoofing and VPN’s spoofing MACs or now even phones and others allow MAC randomizers which will choose a random MAC address, sometimes even just for a specific range. I use VPNs that force MAC randomization with each new connection when I connect to public networks of any kind, for example.
For the above reasons I used the less than absolute verbiage when I said:
Hopefully/should-be unique 
But has been proven in some cases not to be…I just didn’t want to add extra confusion to that. For the above reasons, some companies and devices have tried to start using other identifiers in addition to the MAC address specifically because, sadly, it is not always a guaranteed actual unique identifier nowadays. Kind of weird, because it SHOULD BE unique. Wyze can only say that it is unique to their approved devices on their specific ecosystem/server as they set it up originally. Even then, I have had conversations with some users who have manually edited the Wyze firmware to change the MAC address on some devices to be something else…though that’s another story. My main point was, I agree it SHOULD be unique and I agree that I am sure Wyze is using it as the primary unique identifier, though it’s hard to know if that is the sole identifier they use since other companies are known to use other things too, including serial numbers or other such things added to the MAC to consider it the full unique identifier. I know Eufy has done something similar in order to uniquely identify certain cameras for example.