Confused about Wyze Cam Outdoor

No subscription is required to get the standard 12-second event clips that are stored in the Wyze cloud and accessible in the “Events” tab in the app. This is included for free with the V2s and WCO.

In your case, assuming the door was left open and you have a WCO pointing at the door, here’s what you would get:

  1. Passive Infrared (PIR) sensor detects motion (heat from cat), triggers WCO to record a 12-second event video, hopefully in time to show the cat leaving.
  2. WCO uploads event video to Wyze cloud, sends notification to the app (if enabled).
  3. Video is now available in the Events tab.

In this scenario the WCO behaves the same way the V2 would, except it’s triggered by the PIR sensor rather than motion in the video.

How the WCO differs is that there is no continuous or event recording to the SD card, so if the 12-second clip only catches the cat’s tail as it leaves and you want to see what happened right before that you can’t, because the WCO was not recording until the PIR sensor triggered it.

Also, if the WCO recorded a 12-second clip as the cat leaves, but then a thief runs through your open doorway you would not see that because the WCO has a 1-minute cooldown between 12-second clips. That will be addressed when the WCO gets “Cam Plus” (subscription) to remove the cooldown.

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Thanks again thequietman44. Seems like even with the multiple V2Cams that I bought so far I never thought to use the Wyze Cloud feature; accessing the SD card contents via iOs app has been great so far. If using this feature makes WCO work for me, I’m willing to give it a try…

Just turned it on for the WCO (as well as one of my V2Cams) - let’s see how it works later today.

Thank you!

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Good luck. Just remember that with the WCO there IS NO continuous recording (other than scheduled). If there was no motion, you’ve got nothing.

Got mine up and running today, first of all, I couldn’t put it in the 1st two choices for locations that I wanted, It wouldn’t connect there, so I put it about 40-50 feet from my front door instead. The first location was about 150 feet, from there I can get my regular home WiFi at about 5 Mbps. From the current location where it works I get about 30 Mbps.
I can’t get the live view to work at all on the camera. It just sits at the 3/3 screen. I do get motion events to show up on the Events page.

Hmmm, no motion or no heat that is sensed? Don’t mean to turn this into a discussion about the PIR sensor, but … will a motion event be triggered by the WCO if, say, a door simply swings open or a ball rolls across the floor? Must it be a heat source?

Got my WCO package today. I haven’t tried it yet, but the first impressions are very good.
The build quality is excellent, better than I would expect at this price point. You get a lot of electronics at this price point. Everything is included (except micro SD cards and mounting screws)
I know many in this forum haven’t been happy about the outdoor not meeting their expectations for an outdoor cam. I read the specs and reviews by beta testers before I placed my order, so I pretty much know what it will and won’t do.
“You can’t please all of the people”
“Perfect is the enemy of good” (Meaning if you’re waiting for perfection, nothing will ever get done.)
A product that does everything doesn’t excel at anything.

Now for a minor rant:
For GS, people, please spend one extra penny and make an instruction pamphlet that people with eyes over forty can read. The font size is microscopic and barely readable.
Actually there was enough room on the pamphlet for a larger typeface.

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I guess perhaps I wasn’t the ‘typical’ Wyze user, as until today I have never clicked on the “EVENTS” button on my Wyze app, ever :[

Until now I always click on the camera itself, an then access each camera’s SD clips. Oops.

Now that I see it’s been capturing 12-second snippets which is what I had asked initially (for accessing recordings) - just never knew how to access these 12-second clips until now.

Thanks everyone for all your input.

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That’s actually an excellent point. I suspect you’re right and that doors / balls / boxes / unheated leaves swaying will mostly fail to trigger it.

Hmm, would cars?

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Look up PIR sensors on YouTube, there are some good videos showing how the (very simple) technology works. Basically if there’s enough difference in heat between an object and its surroundings then that object will trigger the PIR sensor when it moves.

The main limitation with cars is distance. PIR sensors don’t usually work past 20-30ft, so cars aren’t usually in range. No car has triggered my WCO on the road 35ft away.

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So since I put up the camera yesterday, I was able to get the live view to work once or twice, but not again since then. Also it has not recorded any events since yesterday. It’s in my driveway and I know I drove by it this morning. Also we had a Tropical Storm come through last night, the eye was about 30 miles east of us. So I would have assumed it would have caught something on that. We did get some branches down in the area.

Lastly, Cam Plus does not appear to work with it. So I have an available license, but can’t assign it to the outdoor cam. For reference, I have 14 other Wyze cams throughout the house and outside (yes 4 indoor cams have been outside for months, one of them is the PTZ cam). No issues with those.

WCO does not support cam plus yet, but they’re working on it.

I’m not terribly versed on the capabilities and nuances of the WCO, but I believe the PIR sensor detects heat (differential), rather than motion. So, in the scenario you describe, assuming the car was 30+ feet (est.) away from the WCO, we wouldn’t expect the camera to have created an event, would we, since PIR detects heat differential vs. pixel shifts (like the v2)? If I’m way off base here, hopefully someone will jump in and clarify, :wink:

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Do we have an ETA on when Cam Plus would be coming to Outdoor Cam? I would purchase it with the launch discount if I knew it was coming sooner rather than later. Otherwise I would just hold off.

Well I couldn’t get the camera closer to the driveway since the range on it was so horrible. So yes, it probably was about 30-40 feet away. If it can’t detect a car driving by at 30-40 feet away, this is pretty garbage camera. The V2 cams I have detect it no problem, in fact they detect too much most of the time.

As it is, I still can’t view the live view of the camera about 90% of the time I check it. And there’s still not a single event created by it.

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I literally drove right by it, pulled up in front of it, backed up. A huge black Suburban. Probably spent 20-30 seconds in the field of view and got maybe 20 feet from the camera. No event recorded. My other V2 that is outside and probably 50-60 feet away recorded a full 23 second clip.

Perhaps overall quality concerns aside, I would think a big difference is that the WCO is simply too far to detect any heat from the car?

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Yeah, it seems there’s still a lot of confusion re: the motion detection method used in these cameras (PIR) versus the V2’s.

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Cars can trigger PIR sensors, especially when they’re very close, but it does depend on the environment. If it’s a hot day and a hot car is rolling up an equally hot driveway there may not be enough difference in temperature to trigger the PIR sensor.

A lot of painstaking testing was put into calibrating the PIR sensor so it would be sensitive enough to pick up warm bodies without false positives from sunlight filtering through moving branches, etc. One of the biggest complaints about the V2 is how many false positives it gets from blowing leaves, changing light conditions, and yes, cars.

It’s also important to note that the PIR detection area is not in the center of the frame, it’s mostly the bottom half of the frame. The app does a good job showing you how to place the camera for best detection at different distances, but it is a limited area.

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Thanks. Sounds like they compromised. Kind of strange they didn’t make the PIR positioning at least slightly independent of the lens (e.g., a 2 or 3 position swivel). With the separate PIR in the sense kit people can tune the detection area in 3 dimensions completely unlinked from any camera position.

Please do this!!!

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