Refrain from disabling your camera's Status Light

Tips & Tricks
1

I had a V2 camera that worked perfectly for more than one year in the same location. Then it unexpectedly displayed Offline status and all the recommended troubleshooting tips failed to get it back online. I figured I may as well download and reinstall the firmware, per the instructions at

While flashing the camera, the Status Light turned blue as expected, but after waiting the prescribed 3-4 minutes, the Status Light was off. I figured the flash process failed and the camera was dead. Then it occurred to me to check the Network Analyzer app on my Android phone and identified the MAC address of the camera was indeed connected to WiFi. I proceeded to Add Device and reinstalled the camera. The camera retained some of it’s former settings and thus settings were not entirely re-set to the defaults.

Thus my theory that you’re potentially shooting yourself in the foot if you disable the Status Light and end up having to manually flash the camera. The lack of status light at some point may mislead you into thinking the camera is dead.

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2

Good tip.
This is something WYZE could remedy by having the flashing process turn the status light on.

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3

Since 32-GB cards are often cheap, like $4 in the closeout bin at Walmart (sometimes) and if one has a lot of cameras, you might as well save the downloaded “demo_xiao_4.9.5.111.bin” file on a spare SD card as “demo.bin”. For the next time you manually install firmware.

The re-installation / Add Device process will check for updates and install the current firmware version anyway, I’m on the Beta app and I can’t help but wonder how many Offline complaints could be solved by manually flashing the SD card and skipping an hour’s worth of troubleshooting.

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