Outdoor Cam Basestation is bricked after FW update

I had two cameras connected to a base station and decided to just bring the cameras in for the winter this year. Yesterday I attempted to reconnect the cameras to the basestation but the app couldn’t find the basestation.

After attempting a couple power cycles and soft resets I still could not connect. What could have happened? All I did was literally turn the cameras off and then back on again 3 months later.

So I tried a factory reset thinking that I’d just start fresh. That helped the app find the basestation but now, despite being directly connected to the router, the app was saying that the basestation was not online. I tried the QR code route, but the basestation was not emitting any Wyze wifi signal that I could find. The light turns solid blue for 30 seconds, then flashes for 30 seconds, back to solid, rinse and repeat but never does the app connect to the station.

After some digging around on these forums I saw a suggestion to manually update the firmware. So I download the latest version, extract it, and place the sd_update folder on a card and stick it in. The boot appears to work and the device resets itself but now the light is permanently yellow. Run a quick power cycle, permanently yellow.

I called customer support today and was told that there was nothing that I can do and that I am basically out of luck, the money I spent and the time I spent troubleshooting. I’ve had this device for less than 20 months - how on earth is the thing entirely bricked after updating the firmware that I got directly from Wyze?

CS also said there was nothing they could do to replace the device, wouldn’t send me a new one and refused to even help me investigate options beyond what I already tried.

I feel like a sucker spending the money on these devices only for them to be entirely trash after less than 2 years of intended use. Ugh.

Did you take the SD card out of base after “the boot worked”? if not the base will just keep on trying to reset itself. Your phone also needs to be on the same 2.4 network.

“Take out the microSD card and remove the folder “sd_update”. If left in, the base station will enter firmware flashing mode every time it reboots.”

So I just tried again with a different FW - 4.16.4.512. I put the SD card in, turned the device on and waited. About a minute went by and the orange light switched to white for about 10 seconds and then back to solid orange and stayed there. I removed the SD card and waited, no change. Power cycled the device again, no change.

And on the SD card I left only the sd_update folder along with the 3 files within it.

Unless you’ve already tried it, using the paper clip in the pinhole (reset) hole of the base station for 30 seconds couldn’t hurt at this point. I tried it the other day and it worked to get my base station back online, although the cause was different from your situation. Good luck.

I came here today because I’m currently in “bad timestamp” hell and came here to see if there was anything wrong with the newest version of the app, which stopped working for me this afternoon. I have only the outdoor v2.