FIXED! ( I think).
As reported in post #1, recently my Pan cam started acting very odd.
Today, I about to try flashing it with previous firmware, as suggested by @Hemi
I accidentally powered up the camera forgetting to insert the SD card containing the 4.10.5.98 binary. Much to my surprise, the cam booted up and started working fine!
Powered down, inserted the SDcard, powered up, and it was misbehaving again.
Rinse and repeat: if the SDcard is in the camera, the camera doesn’t work properly. This behavior is perfectly repeatable.
Out of Curiosity
With the SDcard inserted, the camera gets into an odd state where it’s only drawing 180mA. I’ve measured the normal current draw at around 300 mA (with LEDs off). It appears that there’s something about the file structure or contents on the SDcard that forces the camera into a bad state. It appears to be alive, and will deliver one frame of video to the iOS app, but then it goes south.
I mounted the SDcard in my MacBook Pro and took a look at the contents of the card. It was about half full (17GB used out of 32GB). It’s a Sandisk 32GB High Endurance card.
The majority of the space was taken up by a lot of 1 minute long recordings of motion-triggered video, captured during February. There was a /log folder with a bunch of inscrutable log files (they appear to be encrypted so we can’t see what gets sent to WyzeHQ when we send in logs for troubleshooting). There was also a boot_log folder.
Using the macOS Disk Utility , I ran First Aid. It reported that the SDcard was OK.
I also used an open-source utility Grand Perspective to analyze the directory structures on the SDcard. No problem found.
I could open and inspect the contents of the various folders containing the recordings. I could play them back on the Mac. As far as I could tell, the SDcard was working just fine.
Using Disk Utility, I erased the SDcard, formatting it as MS-DOS (FAT). Put the SDcard back in the camera, and so far, it’s working fine. The only issue is that the blue led doesn’t come on. (yes - the led on/off option is set to on).
Since the camera is now operational, I see no point in flashing it with older firmware. I’ll leave things as they are for the time being and see if the camera continues to behave.