I’d have posted this to “Tips and Tricks”, but it doesn’t get much traffic.
So, this tip applies to several situations with Wyze-sense setups. And, like all things Wyze, it may or may not work for you, because of the incredible mish-mash of hardware and software versions, firmware revisions, etc., that make up the grand beta test we’ve all been doing for Wyze, so caveat emptor.
What I’ve found is that with my v2 Wyze Cam, if you unplug it from power, insert the sense bridge, then power on, the camera comes up fine, all looks good in the app, you can see the bridge, etc., but the bridge does not fully boot, and you end up with a solid yellow light. This results in your existing sensors all going offline, and the bridge is unresponsive when you try to add new devices. Same thing is true if there’s a power failure. Camera will reboot fine, bridge won’t. Happened this afternoon to me.
It’s easy to forget to check if the bridge shows a solid blue light, especially if all looks good in the app. FWIW, I’m on Android, running 2.12, and while there’s an option in the app to reboot the camera, there is NOT an option to independently reboot the bridge. What about the bridge button? According to the changelog, the last firmware revision disabled the button functionality. I haven’t checked it, but I suspect that rebooting the camera when you have a solid yellow light on the bridge won’t fix the problem. Try it and post a reply if you find it works.
So, what’s the tip? Remove the bridge from the camera. Boot the camera first, and when it’s fully booted (solid blue), plug the bridge in. That’s it. It’ll boot fine and go through to solid blue, and your sensors will be back online, and you can add new devices. It seems that the bridge needs the camera to be fully booted before it starts it’s own boot process.
Like I said before, this may or may not work for you due to the variation in HW, SW, and firmware. If it does, glad to help.