Powering Wyze Cams from Battery / Solar Panels

My guess off hand is that the rating on your battery bank is 36000 milliWatt Hour, not milliAmp Hour.

Since you said you are not an electrician, let me take the opportunity to teach a little. Warning, this is gonna get long… Power is the ability to do work (operating the camera in this case). In electrical work, power is normally expressed in Watts (or multiples of that - more later). For smaller amounts of power, it is common to use milliwatts - or 1/1000 watts. In other words, 1,000 milliwatts is the same as 1 watt. Electrical power has several measurements. Two that I will talk about here are volts and amps. The common comparison that is used is to think of a water pipe with pressure and flow rate. The voltage is similar to the water pressure and the current measured in amps is similar to the flow rate in the pipe. Different devices electrical devices use different voltages. If you’re here is the US, the electricity in your wall outlet is around 117 volts. It does vary and is commonly referred to as 110, 115, 117, or 120 volts. The devices in your car (lights, radio, etc) operate at what is referred to as a 12 volt system. It’s actually around 13.6 when the engine is running. USB devices operate at 5 volts - plus or minus 0.25 volts. In my photo above the voltage is the top left number and is showing 5.12 volts so that is withing the specification. These days, almost all portable devices are using the USB standards for charging - which has simplified it for us as we don’t need special chargers for every device. USB-C adds a wrinkle to that that I might get into later.
On to amps (properly called amperes, but no uses that). Amps is a measurement of how much current is flowing. In the photo above, the second number on the left is current and is showing 0.19 amps. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, the device being powered will only draw as much current as it needs. As long as the power source is large enough to supply the required current, it will work. It does not matter how much larger the power source is, the device will only draw as much current as it needs. For example, during my Christmas light show, I have a Wyze V2 camera mounted onto my pixel tree and it is powered from a 5 volt, 70 amp power supply. The camera will happily draw only the about 0.2 amps that it needs. OK, that power supply is also powering about 800 pixels on the tree…
Watts is the measurement of total power. The number of watts is determined by multiplying the volts and amps. In my photo above the third number on the left is watts and is showing 0.96 watts. If you do the math, it’s not exactly right. I assume that is due to rounding off errors because the tester only displays 3 digits.
All of what I have talked about so far is instantaneous values - in other words, what is happening right now. Time does not figure into the equation. However for storage, time becomes a factor. Or to put it another way, now much power for how long. In most cases we use hours. That adds hour to the number. So 1 watt of power for 1 hour would be 1 watt hour (or WH). For smaller devices it is common to use milliwatt hours (or mWH). USB battery banks are very commonly rated in milliwatt hours. So your battery at 36,000 milliwatt hours (or cold be said to be 36 Watt hours) is a moderate size battery bank. The battery bank that is partially seen my photo is rated at 71 WH or 71,000 mWH.
The non-pan Wyze cameras draw between 1 and 2 watts for the most part. Cameras that have IR illuminators will draw more power when the IR LEDs are on. So making an assumption that for your test, the IR LEDs were on part of the time, your 36 WH battery lasting 19 hours sounds about right.

I said I would mention multiplies in power numbers. Starting with watts, for small or very large amounts of power multiplies are used to keep the numbers easier to work with. Here are the common ones:
1 microwatt = 0.000001 watts
1 milliwatt = 0.001 watts
1 kilowatt = 1,000 watts
1 megawatt = 1,000,000 watts
1 gigawatt = 1,000,000,000 watts (for you Back to the Future fans)

The last thing is the USB-C wrinkle I mentioned earlier. All USB interfaces prior to USB-C were dumb. By that I mean that the power source supplied 5 volts and the load drew some current at that 5 volts. USB-C has a mode called Power Delivery where the source and load are both smart and will coordinate with each other to deliver in some case substantially more power than standard USB can. Part of this is to increase the voltage from the power source. In the photo below, my phone is connected to my USB battery bank via a USB-C connection. You will see that the voltage has stepped up 9.15 volts and at that voltage the phone is drawing 1.60 amps for a total power of 14.6 watts. Note that the phone was 90 percent charged at the time. If it has been quite low, it would have negotiated with the battery bank to supply quite a bit more than that. The USB-C power delivery spec allows up to 240 watts, but most devices can’t handle that much.

Told you this was gonna get long…

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Thanks for the interesting tutorial. The basic info familiar but more technical was new to me. The IR drainage info is something that other readers will find useful too.

Btw; yes, I should have taken off the “h” in the “it looks like the Wyze OG camera uses about 1900 mah” statement. :confounded: At 70 years old, it’s been forever since I’ve done any math.

Have a good one.

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This sounds like an old topic, but I was asking the same thing. Have an area of a public park right across from my house and it would be nice to just be able to put camera outside to see who is stealing the shrubs in able to report them. I thought of using a battery pack that is used to charge my iPhone when it is low and I am not near 110V plug. Any reason why that wouldn’t work, Sounds like it is one of the suggestions above. Those banks can be quite large in capacity now. I have a NOCO that will start a car and has both an A and C USB charge port. I stores a lot of juice.

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I am thinking of the same thing for a seperate purpose. I am planning to try a battery pack, one of those that you buy to charge your phone when in the woods. They come in various amp hour capacities now. The same idea is used to start an auto so that device has lots more capacity. If you get a NOCO version, you can get a model that has both an A and a C USB plug. With lots of capacity. And the output voltage would be 5.1 volts or so.

billfern,
My 36000mah battery pack only lasted 19 hours. I just finished hooking my OG cam from our second floor bathroom window down to a first floor outlet since my wife won’t let me run the USB cable from the window and across the bathroom to an available outlet.

In this chat session, K6CCC is our expert and might be willing to help with your effort.

Good luck

You might be surprised. I have one of the larger NOCO jump start batteries and it has less AmpHours capacity than my Onmicharge partially seen in my photos above. However it has the ability to supply hundreds of amps for a very short period of time.

If you really need large capacity, you likely are looking at something like a car battery (or better a marine battery of similar size). Then regulate the 12V from that down to 5V as needed by the camera.

Sir, I too was wanting the same solution. (Bird house cam). In the end, wyze products are not the answer. There are solutions but for DIY, you may want to learn about Pi variants being used for same. PicoW works for still photos ok but live video feeds will need a beefier unit. As usual YMMV. IT REALLY DEPENDS on physical space requirements and your expectated results (and BUDGET).

Sorry

Wasserstein sells the panels for Wyse outdoor. I use them on all 5 of my Blink outdoor cameras

If the Wyze cam is close enough to communicate with your WiFi, it’s probably close enough to run and extension cord. I’ve rigged solar batteries too, and the camera draws too much power, especially when the distance is large.

So I am actually trying to do this for thecrowbox.com project. I have the Arduino powered via an extension cord. However, the squirrels easily climb the cord, Plus the cord is inconvenient. I have to unplug and move it often especially when mowing the lawn.

If this project can do it:

How much bigger of a battery/solar panel is needed for a wyze cam?

This project is to snap photos. I thought you wanted VIDEO? Pictures are easy while videos are not. WiFi is very power hungry for video streaming. Taking photos when motion triggers it is very doable and in fact I have seen many similar projects. You could simply use an old phone and a small solar panel to rig up a workable solution. If you use something like TASKER utility application you can craft a lot of automation. Otherwise, if you are after video streaming via wifi using battery power, you gonna need a bigger “battery”.
B

I have 4 Blink exterior camera on Wifi and each with their own solar panel and the small battery (no extra battery) that is built into the panel. I can go live streaming over WiFi at anytime and no battery issues. They are all set to activate on motion and IR. They continue to record while still having motion. We can go live at anytime if we see the notification and again no issues. I don’t know if Wyze Cams take more power then Blink Outdoor or not. I had Blink before going to Wyse for indoor security.

I would like video. This is one reason why I want to stay with Wyze Cam.

I know I am going to need a bigger battery/solar panel to accommodate the wyze video. That’s exactly why I asked How much bigger?

That sounds awesome. Do you have a link to these solar panels with built in batteries?

I posted it above. In the description it says to fully charge your solar panel before connecting to the Wyze camera. Nothing I can find on the actually battery size. I know with the blink cameras you remove the internal batteries and just plug the cable in where the Mini USB plug power plugs in.

COMPATIBLE WITH WYZE CAM OUTDOOR - Our 2W 5V solar panel ensures that your camera never runs out of battery.

IMPORTANT NOTE - For First time use, fully charge the Solar Panel before connecting the camera. The charging process only begins when the Solar Panel is fully charged.

My confusion…
Unfortunately, the 2-pack specifically states it won’t work for Wyze Cam V2/3

I see this is an old thread and seemed to go off topic but thought I would chime in with what I know works to power a V2 Cam Pan.

I have a Cam Pan V2 in my barn connected to a generic solar panel controller that remains active. I have it set to record motion events rather than constant and it doesn’t miss any events. The controller is on a group 27 deep cycle battery that is maintained by a 100 watt Renogy solar panel.
RNG-CTRL-VOY20.pdf (2.8 MB)

I have tried lesser batteries and panels and other attempts seem to kill my battery overnight.

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What kind of adapter did you use to connect the cam to the 12 v battery?

Here’s some that I am using in several places. Two wires in (needs to be soldered), with 6 - 32 volts in and you get a 5V USB-A outlet.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087RHWTJW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

I am using a solar panel with integrated battery to power mine. ($50 amazon, $24 AliExpress)

The only sticking point is the power connection. On my v3 Pan, I used the cord that came with the camera then a “Duttek USB C Female to USB Female Adapter 3.1 Gen2” $7 I wrapped the connection in heat shrink to seal it from the weather.

Here are links (affiliate)
Solar Panel - https://amzn.to/4cU7le8
USB Adapter - https://amzn.to/49EOX6a

If it works for you, you can get them from AliExpress for about half the price!