The timeline is interesting on the bulb cam. You can also minimize view to have the timeline on the right, horizontally.
Maybe difficult to see by my clips.
Trust but verify.
[MOD EDIT]
I do not recommend Wyze without a subscription. The service will waste your motion events with things that don’t matter, pause 5 minutes, and send you another wasted motion event.
If you get a V3Pro, you can at least do on-camera Person detection and get alerts without a subscription.
Just your opinion on using Wyze cameras without a subscription. Your response after the above quote summed up your experience quite well. Thanks.
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This seems to be the timeline used for all cameras that were released after the V3.
Yes, the new interface was rolled out on the V3 pro:
Yes, the panels will be charging a 12V LiFePo4 battery of 100-200 Ah, I’m not sure about the capacity yet.
The thing is, there is probably no way that solar panels will be able to give enough power for the system, so I will have to take them home for recharging from time to time. I was calculating with 1.5W for V3 camera when recording without IR LED-s, and maybe 2W with them. But even that amounts to 40Wh in average per camera during summer days. When I add the router, I need minimal 250Wh of power per day, and my panels will only theoretically be able to give it during the sunniest days, and usually it will be 100-200 Wh.
So, the battery will slowly discharge and I will have to take it out from time to time for recharging, but it’s OK for me if it isn’t every other day of course. I think with 100Ah I will have to charge it once in two weeks, that’s OK.
So, I will always have power, but if the cameras go wild every 30 minutes without WiFi, that could be a problem. What if connection is not always perfect, maybe during heavy rain? The 4 cameras will be placed in the same enclosure on the roll bar, and the 4G router will be distanced about 2 meters only, but I saw some comments saying that WiFi connection is not always perfect even for such short distances.
An even bigger problem is with 4G signal, because on some places there will be none at all. if I understood it correctly, the cameras need internet connection to synchronize time, right?
Except Travel Mode on the “Outdoor Cam” v1 and v2 (which use the base station), you can’t really do much with Wyze w/o internet.
If you have Wifi within 300 feet line of sight of where you want these cameras, I have had great luck with the Wyze Outdoor Cams v2 with the base station plugged in inside.
All,
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I think @bryonhu has done a lot with this type of stuff. You might want to take a look at the following and/or do related searches in the Forum:
For that model (Cam v3) and other “wired” (no internal battery) cameras, yes. After ~30 minutes without an Internet connection the camera will reboot in order to try to refresh/re-establish a network connection and after the restart will poll for time. When the camera finds that NTP is unavailable (because there’s no Internet connection), it will write the sequential microSD recordings using the firmware’s build date/time as the starting point. If your router can provide a constant Wi-Fi connection (even if it’s not connected to the Internet) and is capable of intercepting NTP and responding to requests, then you should be able to mitigate the problem, which seems to be firmware dependent (i.e., some older Cam v3 firmware versions aren’t affected). That’s my understanding, anyway. A post like this might shed more light:
Like @spkc notes, I wouldn’t expect Cam Outdoor v2 to have this problem with Travel Mode enabled, so that’s a good point. 
I don’t have any hands-on experience with those, though, and my understanding with continuous recording in the Cam Outdoors is that it has to be scheduled in the app and doesn’t just work all the time like when regular continuous microSD recording gets set for other Wyze Cams, so that might be less than ideal.
Also, I’m not trying to push Cam v4. I just think that it might represent a better feature value than Cam v3 (but I don’t have any of that model, and there are community members who seem to swear by them). The comment earlier in this topic about subscriptions being a requirement for Cam v4 is not factually accurate any more than it is for other Wyze Cams, though, so I wouldn’t rule out that model based on that one notion.
That makes more sense, in a way. When you set Event Recording in the app (at least for Cam v4; I don’t have any Cam v3s to test, so I’d appreciate any correction), I believe “Other Motion” tagging is permanently enabled (to make it easier to find in the recording timeline) but notifications can be unchecked, if that’s a concern. The problem with using this sort of motion detection without a subscription, though, is that it’s all based on changes to pixels in the images that the camera is collecting from moment to moment, so I can see how you’d end up with a ton of motion events in that scenario. Depending on your needs and what you really want to detect or capture, a subscription might make sense (but then again you’d need a reliable Internet connection that can upload to Wyze’s servers for the detection analysis).
It seems to be now, anyway. Until fairly recently, it was a vertically-scrolling timeline, which I liked since my oldest is a Cam Pan v3 and had that UI. This new one is yet another change, and I’m not sure if Wyze is just messing with the users or actually working toward a more consistent UI. I didn’t like this new development at first because it was unfamiliar (then again, so was the vertical timeline when I began using that), but it’s growing on me and seems to snap to events more reliably than the previous “new UI” did. I’m getting used to it and starting to like it more.
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Except the OGs, they’re still using the vertical timeline that was used by many cams until recently. Don’t know if they’ll get the update or not.
My Panv3s have been through 3 different timelines in 2 years.
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@Crease and all the others, thank you for your help. Your answers have been extremely helpful and saved me a lot of time/money.
Unfortunately, while Wyse seemed to a be perfect camera for my case, I will have to search further.
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You’re welcome. I’m glad we could answer some questions for you (like the idea of microSD recordings disappearing with out a subscription being completely false) and hope we didn’t introduce too much confusion. As useful and flexible as these cameras are, they’re clearly not the ideal solution for every use case, so hopefully you can find something that works well for your needs, even if it isn’t Wyze.
These cams actually seem like the perfect use case, I’d actually recommend the v4 instead of the v3 since it is higher res and often cheaper than the v3. Even the OGs are a good value and image quality is very good.
If you don’t care about detections or notifications, definitely no need to worry about a subscription. You can choose your SD card size based on how many days you want to store (ranging from a few days on 32GB to 1.5 to 2 months on 512GB).
Which items in the thread are of concern/won’t work for your case?
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You are correct, you’ll need minimum 100W panel to charge the battery and power your gear. If you let the batteries totally deplete between charges they will die way before their lifespan.
As someone who uses a 4G internet be aware that even if you have a signal it drastically fluctuates in speed constantly.
The above have no bearing to what type of cameras you choose.
Yeah I missed that middle post, if there is no internet available at the site and OP needs to supply their own 4G/5G one, plus no power available, step 1 is coming up with a solar+battery+waterproof enclosure setup that can handle the demands. As you say, doesn’t matter what camera brand, that will be a requirement regardless.
@nvalias4 look at the options from Ecoflow, Anker, Bluetti, etc. They all have power station + solar panel setups. You’d need to protect the power station from water, and it won’t be cheap (probably $200 to $300 at least, but they have good deals from time to time on refurbished units on ebay).
Powering the cams isn’t hard, they need 3 to 5 watts each. But adding on cellular internet is where it gets tricky. If you can find a cellular router that will run off USB power you could potentially just get a decent solar panel and a large-ish USB battery bank. Not sure if such a router exists though.
The other option is to not have internet at all and if you need to review footage, just pull the SD card out of the camera. The date and time probably won’t be right but in theory it would work. It would be easier to power just the cams from solar and battery.
I’ve used SD cards and they can last a very long time. Sometimes for months depending on the size. That’s with the camera recording all the time.
Mine have lasted for years, never mind for months. I have four V3’s that have 32 GB non endurance cards, just simple class 10 since 2022 set to continuous recording with no glitch whatsoever.
Thank you, Habib. I was talking about how long they can last before they are “full” and start recycling the videos. I don’t think I’ve ever had one stop working.