Interesting . I got to this thread by searching the forums for ‘iSmartAlarm’.
Why was I searching that term? I was recently trying to make sense of all the devices connecting to my new Deco Mesh network. Lots of amazon devices, iPhones & iPads, some misc stuff I recognized, AND a couple iSmartAlarm devices that had me mystified. So I blocked the iSmartAlarm devices. It took me a while to notice that my Wyze v1 Cams were offline and couldn’t be resuscitated through the app or by power cycling them.
So I started matching up the MAC addresses of all my Wyze devices (from the Wyze app, not checking the labels on the devices) and sure enough the MAC addresses of my Wyze v1 Cams matched the iSmartAlarm devices found by Deco. In the Deco App there’s a screen for looking up who ‘owns’ a MAC address (based on first 6 hex digits of the MAC) and those Wyze v1 Cams MACs belong to iSmartAlarm Inc. So I checked my newer Wyze v2,v3 Cams and their MACs reported Wyze Labs as their owner.
Bottom line, @UserCustomerGwen, do you know if Wyze initially used hardware (kindly or otherwise) provided by iSmartAlarm, in addition to support content, to get the early Wyze v1 Cams out the door to customers?
[Mod Note: post moved from unrelated thread to new topic]
The iSmartAlarm cameras and the wyze ones are the same cameras sold by two different companies. So, it might just be that someone logged iSmartAlarm as the owner in the database you are looking at
Wyze and iSmartAlarm both used the same hardware manufacture. It’s possible that the V1 Wyze cameras use the same MAC address as some of the iSmartAlarm cameras.
I don’t think Wyze re-branded iSmartAlarm’s hardware directly, the manufacturer probably sent the same type of cameras to both companies. The Wyze-specific MAC address probably didn’t come until the V2.
I saw this same thing with my devices from many different companies. My router or firewall device would tell me a device’s MAC was registered to an entirely different company and I’d be confused because I didn’t have a device from these companies. I was shocked. Turns out this is pretty common, ESPECIALLY with ODM and OEM situations, but even sometimes with major companies that just order different parts for their devices from different companies or contract with another company for the network cards (which they didn’t make themselves). MAC addresses are assigned in large blocks and so sometimes the network card says it’s from one company while the rest of the product is actually a different company.
What most likely happened here is fairly straightforward. Hualai is the ODM partner for LOTS of companies, including Wyze, Xiaomi, iSmartAlarm, Neos, and many, many others, including many small companies. Hualai would’ve registered a whole bunch of MAC addresses with the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) all at the same time.
Wyze was a new, small start up with the V1’s, and cared most about making the cameras as affordable as possible. Hualai likely just used left over MAC addresses from their previous recent registration to the IEEE to put together the first few batches of Wyze Cam V1s (using the rest of the MAC’s that went unused by the iSmartAlarm order they’d already registered and still had available to use up).
Now that Wyze has proven themselves as a real large company they just get their own blocks of MAC addresses registered specifically under their name for most everything, but back then when they were small and just starting up, they probably only cared that the cams had a network card, not where the network card or registration for the MAC came from.
I am pretty confident that iSmartAlarm had almost nothing to do with any of it directly. It’s just that they also used Hualai, and Wyze purchased the same V1 camera model from Hualai that iSmartAlarm was also having made for them, and Hualai didn’t get separate MAC registrations for any of them.
But again, all of that is just deduction from my personal experience and knowledge, not from any inside knowledge of Wyze saying any of this to me…my personal opinion/guess.
ISmartAlarm is long gone now anyway. Collapsed financially. Which is a shame because their alarm system was a lot further down the road in features than the wyze HMS in my view. But if a shame wyze didn’t just purchase them and their solution
Here to confirm that we had some cases of iSmartAlarm showing instead of Wyze in the early days. That was fixed a long time ago and I always suspected it was just part of the weird growing pains of having 3 different companies purchasing hardware that looked very similar. Sorry for the confusing goose chase!
. I got to this thread by searching the forums for ‘iSmartAlarm’.