Lights turn on from Smart events but no recording

Cameras
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On our flood light pro, I have the lights set to come on if a person is detected, and they do come on, be it a person, car, animal, lighting change, half the time, nothing at all, but my recordings I have set for people, cars, and animals, so it should be recording every time the light comes on. I don’t get how the light turning on triggers, but the events are rarely recorded.

I have an SD installed, so I can manually, and annoyingly, find events if needed, but what’s the point of cams plus when an event from the camera can trigger the light but not a recording? I have 3 cameras now on my driveway and likely look pretty shady to my neighbors, but all 3 miss events regularly: floodlight pro, v3 pro, and v3 pan. The only saving grace is when I’m manually trying to find an event, the light being on identifies I’m looking in the right place, but that clearly should be recording if a smart event triggers the light…

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My guess is the wifi signal at the flood light is not strong enough to upload the videos to the cloud in the pre-determined time frame (I don’t know what it is but it seems fairly short). Given that they record to SD fine, the events are triggering, it just can’t seem to get them up to the cloud. Could be internet upload speed too but most people nowadays have at least 10-20 megs of upload which should be plenty, so I’d lean more toward wifi (especially given that the flood lights are often mounted outside and a good distance away from the router).

Repositioning your router, up higher if possible, may solve the issue. If it has external antennas, repositioning those can also make a big difference. For 3 antennas, a \ | / pattern is usually best, for 4 you can do \ | | /.

Since the “AI” detections are working, it does have enough connectivity to send the initial image, but the full video seems like it is taking too long. The more detections you have, the more strain that puts on it too so it may just be that things are getting backed up and eventually it gives up.

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While I appreciate the suggestion, and it could have been a reason for some, that’s not the case here. There is a hardwired mesh unit in my garage, less than 15’ away from all 3 cameras, set dedicated in 2.4ghz with static IPs. Nothing questionable in logs, I’d get push notifications of unhealthy network status, and never any issues with other smart devices over 3x the distance on the same connection. Also, running 200mbps on the upload side, so not a bottleneck there either.

I don’t get rid of cameras, so something similar happens at our front door. Originally had a v3 and have since installed the doorbell duo (hardwired) and often only one or the other records people at the door. If someone just walks by, one camera may cloud record, but rarely both. Additionally, those only connect to the primary mesh router, not the one in the garage, again static IPs and set to 2.4. I initially brought up the floodlight pro because that light tells me it’s registering the smart trigger internally at least.

I mean I suppose I can watch the connection logs and try and replicate to see if there’s any attempt, but that would end up being a lot of wasted time not getting anywhere. I’m curious if others have multiple cams in the same location that have very different results on what events cloud record.

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In the garage, I’m guessing the cam is on the outside of the garage, probably directly attached to a wall so not getting signal through windows etc.

Neither of those should matter, the cams only know about 2.4 and static IP doesn’t benefit connectivity at all.

Unless the camera is fully disconnecting, it would not log anything. 2.4ghz is congested and prone to interference, so even if you have a strong signal and stay connected fine, when there is a big chunk of data to upload, that’s when problems arise.

But they may have a better line of sight (through windows etc) to the AP.

That’s another common problem area, as it is mounted directly to a wall with no possible line of sight to the AP.

Along the same lines, if you have two cams competing for limited bandwidth, that just makes the problem worse.

You can definitely try doing stuff like “reset services” under the cams, but the fact that it is recording to SD card fine, identifying what is in the image, etc seems like everything is working fine but it can’t upload the video, which points to the wifi. You can try different channels, try tweaking some of the settings, etc to see if you can improve it. Cutting down on the number of events (via detection zone, sensitivity, etc) might help too if things are possibly getting backlogged. Unfortunately the spots where floodlights and doorbells are typically mounted are also some of the more difficult ones to get a good wifi signal to. I’m not saying it is 100% the problem but all the symptoms point there.

If you can temporarily put that AP outside the garage near the camera, it would tell you if you’re on the right track or not. Similar for the doorbell location. Sometimes an old router and long ethernet cable comes in handy for this sort of testing (ideally put the router in AP mode but not required). If you reboot the cam once the AP is near it, it should lock onto that one as it will be the strongest signal.

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Without posting my resume, let me just say your opinion is appreciated, but incorrect. Even a mobile phone wifi analyzer could quickly identify if that were the cause. A few corrections on your post, the floodlight pro does allow for 5ghz connections, as well as several newer cams, so it does matter, which would typically be less reliable going through exterior walls and provide less range. Setting static IP reservations on all devices allows you to be sure of no IP conflicts causing issues, as well as having the ability to easily identify items with issues in your network logs. While 2.4 can be overly congested in situations like apartment buildings, where multiple networks and network devices might not be the only devices of interference concerns, like microwaves, this is not that situation here. The cams have their own ssid and channel with no neighbors in range on the same channel, so no congestion at all; the cams themselves should not be conflicting unless they are, and in that case that’s something for Wyze to troubleshoot in their firmware, because that’s not typical, but would also show in live feeds as a drop or poor connection, which it is not.

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It isn’t an opinion, it is fact, I could post my resume as well. This isn’t a measuring contest, just giving you some info to use in order to try and get things working. Isn’t that the point of this thread? Or did you not want help with your problem and just wanted to log a complaint? If that’s the case you’d be better served contacting support since Wyze doesn’t really actively monitor these forums.

Yes a couple of the cams support 5ghz (I’m not up to speed on the floodlights so didn’t know the newest one had it, the older ones didn’t). You might find that even though the signal strength is worse, it might actually have more usable bandwidth. 2.4ghz is not “great” at passing through walls, especially exterior ones, often it ends up relying on a window and possibly bouncing off a nearby building to reach your device, which results in very poor throughput. Some of the cams are now supporting 2.4ghz AX (Wifi 6) which can help a bit too but it isn’t a huge improvement, we’ve basically squeezed all we can out of 2.4.

Wifi analyzer on your phone is mostly useless, it will show you neighboring networks, but not how much bandwidth they’re using, interference, or actual usable bandwidth on the frequency. You need special equipment or at least an AP with spectrum analyzer built in to see actual usable bandwidth, interference, congestion, etc. Basically, site survey equipment.

You don’t own a microwave oven, bluetooth devices, or anything that puts out any interference in the 2-3Ghz range? That’s virtually impossible these days. Cell towers operating in the 1.9ghz PCS spectrum (one of the most common) can even interfere.

If your DHCP server is operating correctly, there will be no ip conflicts, and an IP conflict would not impact your wifi signal strength/quality anyway. Your cam would be fully offline if it had a conflict, which again with any DHCP server from the past 20 years or so, is next to impossible. And since these cams don’t have the option to set a static, I’m assuming you mean you’re using manual DHCP reservations, so you’re using DHCP anyway. I’m not saying not to do it, all my cams have DHCP reservations as I like to have things organized, just saying it isn’t helping (or hurting) anything and doesn’t come into play.

Again, just because your channel does not show any other wifi networks on a phone app, does not mean there is not interference or even congestion on that channel. Having a separate SSID doesn’t make anything better, in fact it actually makes it a tiny bit worse as it adds some latency and overhead on the channel.

The cams absolutely conflict. Every wifi device does. It is a shared, half duplex medium and they have to contend for bandwidth. The technology of course has measures to make this work, but they are all fighting for the same chunk of bandwidth and time slots.

Even if your live feed is smooth, the event recording wants more instantaneous bandwidth than the live stream. If you have multiple events happening at the same time, then it becomes exponential.

Like I said, test it for yourself, toss the AP outside near the cam and see if things improve, even as just a temporary test. The “reset services” may help if you’re positive it has nothing to do with connectivity (but like I said, the symptoms do not seem to point that way). There are also settings you can tweak if your router/AP allows you to, which can have positive impact such as
-Disable universal beamforming, at least on 2.4ghz
-Disable airtime fairness
-Disable 802.11b and g on 2.4, this disables legacy rates and beacons and can significantly improve performance, even if you don’t have any of those devices connected. The challenge is each router handles it a bit differently. For example on Asus routers, setting it to “n/ax only” actually doesn’t disable b and g, you have to set it to “auto” and check off “disable b” (which also disables the g rates). But using the analyzer app on your phone, at least a good one, will tell you what the “basic rate” is for your network. You want to get it to at least 6mbit/sec, ideally 12.
-MIMO usually isn’t an issue but it is another one to try disabling, these cams don’t support it and sometimes it can interfere with legacy devices.
-Try setting the channel to auto, the radio in the router is able to see interference, and while its mechanism is usually somewhat crude, it often can pick a better channel than you can if you don’t have the right equipment to analyze the channel. A single bluetooth device can mess up several wifi channels but you’d never know it just looking at neighboring networks in a wifi analyzer app.

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