I have a Cam Floodlight installed and set to turn on when dark and motion is detected by either the PIR sensor or by the camera. This worked well by itself. However, I also want to trigger the floodlight when it’s dark and my rear door is opened, because motion isn’t detected unless I walk out into the yard and jump up and down in front of the camera. So, I created a rule using a device trigger: if the back door opens and between 15 minutes before sunset and 15 minutes after sunrise, the floodlight turns on for 5 minutes. The rule works perfectly, but motion detection is then broken going forward.
I just tried troubleshooting this step by step, including disabling the rule, restarting the floodlight and camera, deselecting and reselecting the motion trigger checkboxes, all without getting motion to trigger the floodlight. I resorted to going into the PIR sensor test mode, and I had to walk around for a good 30 seconds before it triggered. I’m beginning to wonder if something more is going on that is causing it not to trigger the floodlight, even though the camera is clearly detecting motion and recording.
It is currently raining, so maybe that has something to do with it. I’ll try testing with my other floodlight tomorrow and post back. In the meantime, maybe someone has noticed this, or this is a known issue?
I believe this was tested in the past by @R.Good and was confirmed to be an issue.
It appears as though when the Floodlight is set to activate on both PIR and camera motion, there is a 10 minute reset period after the rule turns them off. This does not appear to be the case if only one of the activation methods is set to activate.
See these posts that explain the tests and results:
Hi @SlabSlayer, thanks for the response! I haven’t gotten a chance to test any more, hopefully tonight. I’m fairly certain that when I first created the rule, I had the flood light set to go on when motion was detected by the PIR sensor, not by the camera. I added firing on camera detection in an effort to determine whether the PIR sensor was failing, or otherwise figure out what was going on.
It seems there is an overall conflict between motion detection in camera settings and rules. For instance I noticed I turned the flood light on manually, setting it to “on” in the settings. The rule still turned the light off (I have it set to fire the light for 5 minutes whenever the door opens, since I can’t use a smart switch for now) after 5 minutes, even though the dog was running around right in front of the camera. This morning, anticipating this, I set the flood light to “on” and disabled the rule and it still turn the light off, presumably because some timer was already running before I disabled the rule.
This is bad programming and is discouraging. I replaced a dumb light that works on a switch that I could turn off and on when I wanted, and for this I’m fighting to make the light go on and off when I want it to. Not sure if other people feel the same way, but if this is a bug it really needs to be fixed. Changing the flood light control manually should override any internal timers that were created by a rule.
Am I understanding this correctly? Am I doing something wrong? I will try to do some more troubleshooting tonight.
I like Wyze products, but I’m not the type to fight with technology. Either it does what I need it to do, or it doesn’t need to be in my life.
Rules don’t check how the light was turned on before sending the Off command. It just sends the Off command. Regardless of if the light was turned on by Motion Detection, by Rule, by the Live Stream button, or in the Cam Settings; if the light goes on the trigger for the rule is pulled. It starts the 5m countdown and turns it off. If the light turns on by any means, and the Rule starts the 5m countdown, but you manually turn off the lights after 3m, the rule will still execute and send the Off command even though the light was already off.
If you have a Rule triggered by a contact sensor opening to turn On the lights for 5 minutes, it will send an On command to the lights immediately, regardless of if they are already on or off and regardless of how they came to be that way. The Rule will wait 5m and send an Off command to the lights regardless of their status.
Rules are fire and forget commands. They don’t check status before sending Action Commands.
It doesn’t matter if the cam has active motion. When the rule executes, the Off command is sent and the lights go off. There is a short reset period at that point for the cam to go back into active Motion Sensing for the lights to be turned back on by either Cam Motion or by PIR. It is not instantaneous and the Rule does not check the current motion status before turning off the light. You programmed the Rule to send an Off command after 5m. It did.
Check your Rules History to see if the rule, or another one, turned off the light at that time. Also check your timer in the Floodlights settings.
It seems to me that you are fighting against the rules you created.
This is really helpful. I will go back tonight and do some troubleshooting. I never noticed that there is a history of the rules firing, so I’ll take a closer look at that (I just went and found it).
So do you think this would work?
rule to turn on floodlight indefinitely when door sensor is opened
rule to turn off floodlight if no motion has been detected for five minutes
That will still override me turning the light on manually I guess. Is there any way around they? Will a smart switch function the same way?
Spoke to WYZE support about this kind of issue and the outcome was that there is no solution at the moment. Hopefully they will provide a firmware update that fixes all this nonsense.
I’m super frustrated with my new Wyze floodlights. I bought 3 and had them installed AND they suck. They didn’t work great just on PIR so I added motion by camera and then rules and now they sometimes work but mostly don’t. Or they will come on a while later after we already walked past them and got into the car. The stupid lights we replaced always worked and thought having this manual control would be nice. It would be fantastic if they actually worked!!
Throwing my hat into the ring for a workaround or fix here. I have a v3 cam set to trigger a separate floodlight, which is of course set to go off when its own sensor or camera detects motion. If the isolated v3 cam rule turns on the floodlight, the inherent detection on the floodlight stops working. This is quite disappointing and frankly it doesn’t seem difficult to fix. Nearly makes the floodlight useless for my application, in fact.
If there is no way to prevent this situation with the simplified method Wyze uses for rules, perhaps an “expert mode” of sorts would be possible for rule creation? Maybe the architecure doesn’t allow it but man would it be nice. Even with no guarantee of support if I back myself into a corner.