Just installed two lamp sockets and mind blown on what they can do!
The only thing that I can’t get it to do is motion detection without darkness. I understand that will trigger the flood light even in day time but that’s fine by me since they are LED and stay on for only a minute.
Use Case:
The front of my house has two carriage lights on each side of the door. The v3 camera is up on the corner looking down and controls an additional two very bright flood lights. The carriage lights turn off at midnight and it becomes pitch black for the camera/light socket to take over. Works perfectly in that scenario for motion detection.
But, in the dark hours after sunset and until 12 midnight when the carriage lights are on, the camera sees the light cast by the carriage lights as “not dark enough”. Motion detection doesn’t work during those hours and I want it to work if people come to the front door. I tried setting some rules and I can’t get it to do what I want it to do. Very possible I’m not a good Rules person. LOL!
To my eyes the carriage lights are not that bright but human light detection vs. camera light detection are quite different. In the camera’s “eyes”, it’s not dark.
Any way to accomplish this? I can’t be the first person to have too many lights in the front yard that may trick the camera in thinking it’s not dark enough.
Mike, thank you for your great explanation and use case. I have been advocating for Wyze to allow the lamp socket to more easily be used in lighter conditions for a while too. You are not the first to struggle with the “dark enough” situation. I think we are fighting an uphill battle though because there are a lot more people asking Wyze to change the light sockets to be more sensitive about turning on when it has light. The issue made it into fix-it-friday and Wyze is working on trying to prevent it from turning on during the day-time:
Unfortunately, it seems the lamp sockets are even more sensitive about not turning on when there is light. It would be nice if they just allowed us to set a schedule when it was active regardless of the amount of light. Or I wish they would allow us the following settings as options:
Turn on the lamp socket ANY TIME motion is detected (day or night)
Turn on the lamp socket when motion is detected only at night (sunset to sunrise and even if there are already other lights on).
Also would love if the timer option kept the lights on for that amount of time until the motion has been clear for at least that many minutes. Say we set a timer for 3 minutes…right now the timer starts the moment the camera first detects movement and will shut off in exactly 3 minutes even if there is still movement going on and a person present in the camera view. I am hoping they can fix it from a static timer (shuts off no matter what when that amount of time passes) to a more dynamic one (shuts off after that much time passes with no other movement occurring during that time).
I’ll keep advocating for this. When this subject next comes up with the Wyze devs in the beta threads as they’re making adjustments I will try to remember to reference your use case as another example for why this is important to account for. They’re in the middle of testing some firmware updates, so there should be some chances to give feedback as they work on this.
Thanks for advocating! Your two bullet points, either one, would solve my problem.
Turn on the lamp socket ANY TIME motion is detected (day or night)
Turn on the lamp socket when motion is detected only at night (sunset to sunrise and even if there are already other lights on).
I was looking for such a scenario or applications of Rules to create similar but couldn’t. Sounds like with the current options you really can’t.
I understand the not resetting of the count down after each motion detection can be annoying but I think the inability to set motion detection in non-darkness (or not dark enough) situations is more than annoying, I would say to the point of a short-coming or lack of feature/robustness.
To be honest, I finally gave up on trying to use these lamp sockets because of this issue. I wanted to use them in my basement kitchen too automate lighting but I couldn’t rely on them so I switched back to color bulbs.
I haven’t heard anything recently so I’m guessing it’s still a problem.
Probably works great for some people’s use cases, but it’s a shame they didn’t make it more open to other use cases like ours.