How do you use Wyze bulb?

Power & Lighting
1

Hi, everyone!

I’m WeiMing, a PM intern at Wyze. I’m here to help improve our product features and review our app experience.

For those of you with Wyze Bulbs who adjust the brightness and color temperature pretty frequently:

  1. What kind of situation will make you adjust the brightness and color temperature almost every day?

  2. Have you added a light bulb “Scene”? Is it helpful? How can we make it better?

Thank you so much for your feedback! We appreciate your help.

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Welcome, Wei Ming.

  1. the scene is helpful to an extent, but right now you can’t set bulbs to be “off” within a scene. If you can add this it would be helpful.

are we able to set scenes using google assistant ?

Other than that, we need an urgent firmware fix for the issue of the bulbs not re-connecting after a power surge. This is the highest priority.

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Welcome! I have 8 bulbs but I haven’t used the color temperature much because certain residents are not on board with “daylight” colors :slightly_smiling_face:.

  1. Every day I have my bulbs in overhead fixtures change brightness to 100% at 7am, 75% at 7pm, and 50% at 12am. I have this automated using a shortcut so I can have bright light during the day, less light in the evening, and not be blinded if I get up in the night.
  2. I like the idea of scenes, but in practice I never use them because I have to open the app, tap on a bulb group, then tap on the scene. I almost exclusively control my lights using Google Assistant voice commands, so I end up creating scenes in Google Home instead.

If I can get all residents on board with different color temperatures I would like to have a built-in function to change the brightness and temperature automatically throughout the day to match the daylight patterns. Maybe a slider to adjust the warmest/coolest color temp range and another to set min/max brightness. Even if it only defined 4 periods (morning, afternoon, evening, night) that would save a lot of shortcut-making :slight_smile:

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I did set up scenes in the app but I found I don’t use them.
I have one bulb set in the app , to automatically turn on at sunset 8:30 pm on dim, and turn off at sunrise 7am , of course for now I will have to change the times occasionally
I adjust the brightness and color temperature a few times every day on some of my bulbs ,but I use my echo dots with routines that I set up in the Alexa app .
I set up one special routine that when I say , emergency , all 12 bulbs at once come on to 100% brightness cool white

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I am not sure as that is just a simple firmware fix, it is not happening to everyone, I tried my best to recreate it last weekend by cutting power and flipping it on and off and no matter what I did my bulbs came back and reconnected on their own every time. They need to figure out why it is failing on the people it is failing on.

That being said the only bulb I change the color on I am currently using on my porch. I have it on soft white and 75% brightness unless a cam detects motion then it changes to 100% daylight

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6

I have 2 bulbs but I took 1 apart :crazy_face: and the other I use as a game for my kids. I would use them however if there was a setting to have them auto adjust temp based on time and location. Basically when it is day outside I want it to be daylight inside and if the sun is down I want it to be as soft as possible. However I want it to be a smooth transition throughout the day.

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7

I am trying to achieve that using, IFTTT, SmartThings and WebCore, the only thing I don’t quite have down is the smooth transition as IFTTT seems to only allow me 25% increments.

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8

I have 4 bulbs in my living room cieling fan which is the primary light. they are typically set to daylight, I also have several cameras one of which is nearby with the sensor reciever unit on it and I have a motion detector near the television pointed at the main room and all is associated with the amazon echo and google assistant. also have a bulb in a lamp in the bedroom and master bath as well as 2 in the backyard… in the evening when I am moving around in the front room all 4 fan lights are on bright. If I sit down and watch Tv after a couple minutes the sensor sees no movement and turns off 3 of the fan bulbs and leaves the remaining one pointing away from the tv to 1% for evening viewing comfort. If I get up for any reason the motion detects and the lights fade up to bright again. I really like this setup it is working out very well. at the end of the evening I can walk down the hall and tell “computer turn off living room” (to the echo) and it goes off, otherwise it goes to dim again. when I get up for midnight snack on come the lights. It would be a lot better to have these features be time sensitive so during the day time they are inactive and in the late evening I can set midnight snack to be dark → 1 bulb 1% instead of 4 bulbs bright (40%±). adding additional simple boolean parameters to the actions and other inputs like time would be very helpful. in the bedroom it is nice to be able to ask "computer, turn on bedroom’ and the bulb comes on. I can still use the other lights manually. being able to turn up and down and on and off the bedroom and the master bathroom via voice and the slow fade change (very nice) is really very pleasant and helpful as I can modify light as I need it without any impediment. an up or down side with motion is that the dog sometimes is stealth as her fur is IR shielding if at the same temp or is not if she comes in or out depending on the temp. as she moves around inside at night not much light changes but when she comes in from outside the lights go on/off. Pairing the lights to the sensors is golden.

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I’d like to use a couple of bulbs in the carriage lights outside my garage. They’d turn on at sunset and then turn off about three hours later. Unfortunately, it seems that the app cannot set them to do that, so I haven’t bought them yet. However, once the app supports “sunset” as a time, I’ll be happy to buy them. :slight_smile:

10

You can set the bulbs to turn on at a set time and turn off at another set time with shortcuts
I have some that turn on at 8:30 PM and they turn off at 7 AM of course I would have to adjust this as the days get shorter but I don’t think that’s a big deal

https://support.wyzecam.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030764911-Schedules-and-Automations

Shortcuts is a feature that allows you to set up specific actions based on a schedule or a manual trigger. Examples of Shortcuts are:

  • Turning on motion detection and notifications for all cameras at 7AM Monday through Friday
  • Uploading a 12-second video to the cloud at the top of every hour

Creating a shortcut requires triggers and actions. A trigger tells the shortcut when to start and an action is the end result of when the trigger’s conditions are met.

How to create a shortcut:

  • To add a shortcut, tap […] in the top-right of the Home screen of the Wyze app. Then, tap Edit Shortcuts.
  • At the bottom of the next screen, tap Create Shortcut.
  • Enter a name and set your icon by tapping the current icon. It will allow you to select from five icon types: I’m home, I’m away, Go to bed, Wake up, and Other. Tap the icon you want.
  • Add an action. There is no limit to how many actions a single device can perform in a trigger or how many devices can be affected by a trigger. You can even select a group of Wyze Cams to have the entire group affected by whichever Action you select.
    • Wyze Cam v1/v2 – Turn motion detection on/off, restart the camera, and upload a 12-second video to the cloud, Turn notifications on/off
    • Wyze Cam Pan – Turn motion detection on/off, restart the camera, upload a 12-second video to the cloud, Turn notifications on/off, and reset position
    • Note:The 12-second videos will show up as an “auto scene event” in the Notifications tab.
    • Tap Save to save the action
    • Tap the back arrow to return to the Shortcut page or tap Edit to delete or rearrange your actions.
  • If you would like to automate your shortcut on a schedule or an event, toggle on Automate and choose an Event or Time of day and days of the week to automate the action.
  • Tap Done in the upper right corner to save your shortcut.
  • To check if your shortcut is working, go to the Account tab and tap on Shortcut History . It will show if a shortcut was triggered, when it triggered, and if it was successful or failed to complete.

How to modify a shortcut:

  • To edit a shortcut, tap on the […] in the top-right of the Home tab of the Wyze app. Then tap Edit Shortcuts.
  • On the next screen, tap the shortcut you want to edit.
  • To delete a shortcut, tap Edit in the upper left corner of the Shortcuts screen and tap on the Delete button next to the shortcut you want to delete.
  • To rearrange a list of shortcuts, tap Edit in the upper left corner of the Shortcuts screen. Tap and drag the two lines on the side of the Shortcut that you’d like to rearrange.
11

You underestimate my laziness, sir. :grinning: I don’t want to have to remember to adjust the times as the Earth orbits the sun. TP-Link’s Kasa app has this feature, so it’s doable and should be a must for any product that wants to be used outdoors. Of course, Wyze says these are indoor bulbs, so I don’t fault them for not including the feature, but it’s on my wish list nonetheless.

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Well , they are working on the feature , so maybe it won’t be to long

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13

IFTTT has a Weather Underground trigger that fires at sunset for your location. You can use that in conjunction with the Wyze IFTTT integration to turn on your bulbs.

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It’d be nice to have it all included in a single app, since it makes debugging easier, but yes, I could use IFTTT to jury-rig it until Wyze updates the app.

15

please please please add local control! i plan to use 12 of these bulbs and that means that every single one will be breaking out of my network exposing more surfaces for security risks.

if you enabled the local webservice to hit “http://X.X.X.X/state/on” or “http://X.X.X.X/color/2700” that would be so much more secure, and i can disable the cloud component
(it would also mean you would integrate with EVERY home automation system on the planet :slight_smile: )

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Have you looked at IFTTT? It have Weather Underground which based on your location does the sunset and sunrise time for you.

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I looked but didn’t see that for wyze

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Sorry you have to go to platform.ifttt.com, create an account. Then you can create an applet that has weather underground sunset trigger Wyze light bulb to turn on. Then create one that has sunrise turn off the light bulb.

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Hi @Wei-Ming, excited to see what you achieve during your internship with Wyze! I don’t currently use Wyze bulbs becaues they lack the one scene/color/brightness feature I really want. I would love to be able to have an automatic sunrise simulation (slowly get brighter and cooler temperature over a set period of time). I would use this an alarm clock companion to help me wake up naturally.

I currently use a Philips Hue bulb for this, but would switch to Wyze if it were supported. Other than that, I rarely dim or change the color of my existing smart bulbs (Hue and Eufy brand), and I’ve never used their equivalent of the scene feature.

20

if wyze was controllable locally - you could use node-red to send the brightness and color values over time (or in fact through most home automation platforms).
(Kinda why local control is so useful)