Just received 2 v2 cameras.
Set one up at home in mere minutes, no problem. Cool!
Brought other unit to work today to see if I could utilize the provided, open, unsecured, available wifi network to show the view out my 2nd story office window. Nope. Setup failed - never “connected”. I discovered somewhere in the forum comments: Unsecured wifi not supported.
I’m curious why not?
Thanks!
I’m not sure where you read that unsecured wifi is not supported. That’s not true. If you try to connect to an unsecured wifi and leave the password field blank, you will get this screen:
If you click “No Password”, the camera will go ahead and connect to the unsecured network. I’d be a little concerned, though, about the camera getting hacked in that environment.
HOWEVER, there are two reasons you may be having trouble:
Your open network is 5GHz only. WyzeCam requires a 2.4GHz network and will not connect to a 5GHz only network.
Your open wifi has a landing page. In other words, when you connect to the network with your phone or computer, a screen comes up where you have to click a button to accept terms and conditions, or something similar. If so, the WyzeCam will not be able to get past this page. Landing pages are common with public wifi such as hotels and airports.
The workaround for #2 is to use a travel router to serve as a bridge between the public wifi and camera. Once you connect to the public wifi through the travel router with your phone or computer (dealing with the landing page), then the camera will not need to deal with the landing page for its connection. You would need a travel router that supports WISP protocol such as the one linked below. One advantage of this approach is that it essentially adds VPN-like security to the open wifi setup.
Once the bridge is completed and the travel router is connected to the hotel WiFi, am i able to take my phone with me and use the Wyze Cam just like I would if I were at home. Also, anyone able to make a YouTube video to walk a non tech person through on how to set this up.
Correct. You have to use your phone (or a laptop or tablet) to get the travel router connected to the hotel wifi. After that, you can take your phone with you and connect back to the camera. The only glitch would be if the hotel has a setup where it times out and you have to click through a landing page again to reconnect. I have only seen that rarely and usually it’s a 24-hour timeout.
If I get time, I’ll try to type up some simple instructions to set up and connect the router. Can’t promise when I’ll get to it though.
Thanks for the quick reply. I am going to give it a try and see if I can muddle through this one. If not I will wait for instructions.
Thanks again
Jasper, I’ve got a draft of instructions for setting up the GL.iNet. Just need to get it reviewed/edited and I’ll post it. Early this week, hopefully.
No worries. I will give it a go later this week on travel. If it works great if. It I will wait on your instructions once you get them posted.
Thanks again for the help.
Jasper,
I’ve attached the travel router instructions. Let me know if you have any questions.
Travel-Router-Instructions.pdf (1.24 MB)
Thanks. I will give it a try.
RickO,
Just wanted to send you a HUGE thank you for taking the time to create these excellent instructions. I plan on using this setup on an upcoming trip to utilize hotel WiFi (which will no doubt have a landing/portal page) with a couple Wyze cams.
Brian
You’re very welcome.
The latest version of the Wyze app (installed today - 1/31/19) does not allow proceeding with no password (password field left blank).
The “Next” button at the bottom of the screen is ‘grayed out’ until a certain number of characters are typed into the “Enter Wi-Fi Password” section.
How to connect the Wyze camera to an OPEN Wi-Fi network now?
For security reasons, Wyze made the decision to no longer allow setup on open wifi networks. Unless Wyze changes their minds on this, there are a couple of workarounds that can be used if you want to keep your base home network unsecured but also provide a secure network for the Wyze Cam. One is free and the other has a small hardware cost. I realize these may not be suitable in all cases.
Most wifi routers have the ability to have a separate guest network, often without a password required. You could set the guest network up with your existing SSID (so you don’t have to change any other devices) and set up the primary network with WPA2 encryption to be used with the Wyze Cam.
You could use a travel router as an intermediary device that will connect to your unsecured home network and bridge that over to a secure network accessible by the Wyze Cams. Complete instructions for that are here:
Finally, there is a Roadmap topic about this asking Wyze to reconsider (link below). You can hop over there and vote for it. Be sure to click the VOTE button at the top.
Poor decision on Wyze’s end to force all users into their world. I will flash back and refuse all updates until this is resolved.
@skier8888… In my discussions with Wyze about this, they seem pretty firm on the decision. So you may be missing out on some really good improvements (eg. multi camera streaming). You may want to consider one of the workarounds described above.
I have a few of these that I use to monitor equipment at work. I certainly do not want to put them on the secured network as they are a rather high security risk to the rest of the network. I wouldn’t have purchased the ones I just did if I had known this. They are of no use to me now. I am far more concerned about someone hacking into the WYZE network and accessing cameras through there than I am hacking into a camera on a open public network at my work. And if someone does hack into the camera, all they will see is an equipment display panel.
I don’t really understand why you consider the cameras to be more of a security risk connected to a secure network than an unsecured one.
However, here’s a solution (with a nominal cost) that will let you connect the cameras to the unsecured network while still having them isolated:
I am not saying the cameras are less secure on a secured network. The cameras themselves are inherently not very secure regardless of the network they are on. If they are on our open, unsecured network, at least they are separated by a firewall from all of vital equipment.
An 80% increase in cost per camera is a nominal cost? Although these are not really expensive, anytime you start almost doubling the cost per unit, the value proposition gets eaten up quite rapidly.
Unless the cameras are far apart, you should only need 1 mini router to serve them all.
This is not a simple residential sized environment. I have maybe two cameras that could be handled by one, otherwise there is simply too much distance or interference, and each camera would need their own, if it wasn’t a violation of company policy. My organization does not allow independent wireless networks within their environment.
