I’ve decided to leave the Wyze ecosystem. I’ve ended my Cam Plus sub. I will continue to use my Sense Hub until/unless something changes with it when the sub goes. That being said, I have a LOT of Wyze cams! 3xCam Pan v3, 1 Cam V3 Pro, 3xV3s, 3xCam Pan v2s and several V2s. I was reading that RTSP firmware had been removed or something.
Is there any way to repurpose these cams for anything useful or are they essentially landfill unless I sell? I’m so lazy to sell them but I really, really don’t want to dump usable cameras.
Turn off the IR on your Eufy cams, use the Cam v3 cams as outboard IR blasters. The v3s don’t need the app or WiFi to blast IR and they’ll auto-switch to IR on if you set NV mode to auto before yanking them. All of your Wyze cams will do the same, but some blast better than others.
I don’t use IR on my Eufycams, they all have color night vision and there’s enough light outside that they never need IR. My inside Eufycams are the same, they somehow suffice with the nightlights we have pop on and never use the IR. But this is a really good idea…
Believe it or not, I’ve never written anything off for taxes…lol, again…lazy. I don’t think a non-profit will pay a sub for cameras requiring an app, but this is food for thought, thank you.
Local High school is an idea as well. Do you know how I would go about asking places like this? Thanks again.
Personally, I like the donate to a school or NPO idea. Researchers love Wyze cams for Time lapses of projects, etc too.
Having said that, you can absolutely use RTSP on lots of your cameras. It sounds like you would be most interested in using the Thingino project:https://thingino.com/ since it replaces the firmware and allows you to keep using your Wyze cameras without using Wyze at all, not even the Wyze app. But I will list all the other RTSP options as well.
Common 3rd Party Solutions to get RTSP on Wyze Cameras:
This App has historically supported ALL Wyze cams, but can only be used on Android. Many people use either an old Android phone or an Android Emulator on a computer to run it constantly. The creator/Founder became a Wyze Employee in 2020.
Scrypted now natively supports Wyze to get RTSP, though most people in their Discord server recommend just using Docker Wyze Bridge instead to get the cameras into Scrypted, it is included here for convenience.
Note that this project may lose some functionality with some of the newer firmware, and while you may be able to revert back to older firmware, you may put your security at risk by doing so.
Note that this project may lose some functionality with some of the newer firmware, and while you may be able to revert back to older firmware, you may put your security at risk by doing so.
Open-source Firmware for Ingenic SoC IP Cameras, which includes Wyze Cam Pan 1, Wyze Cam 2, Wyze Cam Pan 2, Wyze Cam 3, Wyze Video Doorbell 1, Wyze Cam Pan 3 (conditionally supported and has Secure Boot which could render your camera unusable). Make sure you download the firmware that matches the camera model, SoC, image sensor, Wi-Fi module, and flash chip size.
You can follow this video and script to identify which firmware you’re supposed to get for your particular camera (which hardware revision your camera is): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX637mrp0R0
Look for a local high school’s web site. See if you can find a name of a Computer Science teacher or Robotics teacher listed. Sometimes a contact email will be listed if not you could leave a message by calling the main office phone number of that school.
Thingino is a bit too much for me. Having to pull the cameras to figure out the chips etc. turned me off of that project.
I got my mind set on converting them to HomeKit, and did a lot of reading where it seems like Scrypted was the way to go. Then I realized that the “easy” version of Scrypted requires a $40 sub, so no. The slightly harder way would require me to get Proxmox, which is not too much of an issue, and then install Scrypted and figure out all these … commands. I messed with Linux like 10 years ago…seems all of the ways are heading to this which I’m hesitant to do.
I got Tinycam Pro and will do the server mode thing. Just need to figure out getting it into HomeKit now without all the sudo commands. I have a 2 QNAP Nas’s, so maybe I’ll find something I can do with that.
I just barely setup a mini-PC with Proxmox, Docker and Portainer this week then moved my Docker Wyze Bridge to it. I am highly considering setting up Scrypted to use it for the object detection capabilities (though I might just use Frigate).
I’m told Scrypted is often recommended to run more as a docker than VM, so if you already have Docker Wyze Bridge running, that means you already have Docker, right? You shouldn’t need Proxmox if you’re sticking to just dockers.
Scrypted can do a lot of things Home Assistant can do, but I’m told it’s a little more complex and often requires more scripting. Another user on here was telling me that they had Scrypted integrated into Home Assistant for a while and eventually switched to just Scrypted because they didn’t need an extra layer when Scrypted did everything for them anyway. They highly recommended the Scrypted Discord channel since there are a lot of helpful people there (even the dev is active) and a dedicated Wyze channel. I can’t personally comment much about it though since I haven’t tried it, though I intend to. I hear it is was more efficient on resources for things like camera image detections than other options. That is what has me tempted to try it.
I don’t have anything set up. I got scrypted first but it ended up being the $40 per year nvm so I removed it. I realized the free version was the one I had to use commands for. Then I got homebridge or something that uses containers on my NAS but realized that this still requires some level of using paths and commands to do stuff as well. Then I got Docker on my Mac Mini which is as good as having a server since it’s always on but it’s the same as Homebridge, containers, plugins etc. The interdependencies confuse me and having to deal with commands even more so, you know? Now I wish I had been more bullish with playing with Linux back in the day.
I don’t need object detection etc because all I want to do is take the feed from tiny cam pro and pop it into something that will allow me to feed it through HomeKit and HKSV which will/should take care of the rest. And this is where I’m at. I’m still wading through all the YouTube videos at this point, I think I’m close. But of course Hurricane Milton is now here to cramp my style so hopefully this is to be continued!