I replaced a V2 camera with a V3 pan camera and it’s not alerting me to cars coming into my driveway as the V2 did. My driveway is about 50’ away. The V2 would pick up cars going down the street if I turned it to 100. I have this V3 Pan on 100. The smart detector has vehicles turned on. I don’t want to move the camera closer to the driveway as it now views both my front door and driveway area. I like the pan feature and hate to go back to the V2 type camera. Any suggestions?
At that distance the algorithm is going to have a lot of trouble determining what type of object it is. If you set it to “all motion” or enable the “other motion” type, it should have no trouble picking it up, One of my pans picks up motion at over 50 feet and I have it set to like 30 or 40 for the sensitivity.
Did your v2 have Cam Plus with smart detections enabled? I’d be surprised if that one could identify a vehicle at that distance, but I suppose anything is possible.
Thank you for your reply. I will do as you suggested. I didn’t think about that. I hate to use motion because it picks up tree limbs moving during windy conditions, but I want to be sure I know when a delivery truck or other vehicles come up my driveway.
Combining it with detection zone should help, bear in mind that your DZ just needs to catch any part of the vehicle moving to send an alert so you can probably make it pretty specific and avoid the trees.
My driveway has a parking area in front of the house and the driveway continues to the rear of the house. I measured and the V3 Pan is 90’ from the driveway and I’ve tried all the suggestions and it will not pick up on a car or van. The back doorbell camera is also 90’ away and has no problem picking up a car. The V2 that I replaced with the Pan camera would easily pick up a car and even a car on the street, which is about 150’ away if I set it at 100%. Now, I’ve got to replace this pan camera with something else, or it’s defective. If others are picking up a car at 90’ with their V3 Pan, then mine is defective. If they won’t, then I’ve got to replace it. I really wanted a pan camera on the front porch where this one is located, but if there’s not one that will do what I want, then I have no choice. Your opinion?
Correction: I said my old one that picked up really well was a V2. It was an OG camera.
The issue is not picking up motion, it is identifying the object. If you set it to “all motion” then it does not need to upload a picture to wyze, analyze it, identify the object, then send you an alert.
The other cameras you mention, were they using “smart detections” to identify cars also? It wouldn’t be a defect with the cam as long as the image quality is fine, however it could be a poor wifi signal (quality, not necessary strength) at the location the cam is mounted, or may even just be a matter of doing “reset services” on that cam to see if it helps.
But from what others have posted here, 90 feet is pretty far for it to be able to identify a specific object successfully. It is a bit far for plain “other motion” too but if the sensitivity is high enough it should probably work.
Yes, OG was set to smart and did a really good job. Unfortunately after about 2 years it quit working. The V3 pan set to motion, no smart, wouldn’t pick up anything beyond about 50’. I walked up the driveway waving my arms and it finally got me. Do you have any idea which Wyze camera works the best for distance, I’m guessing that since this pan camera has such a wide field of view, that it can’t pick out people or cars very far away and I can’t make it zoom and continue to zoom when it’s not on screen. Or can I?
I can’t add another camera closer to the driveway unless I spend a bunch of money for more WiFi equipment. My WiFi won’t reliably reach that far. I don’t understand why you can’t buy a wifi router that will reach twice as far rather than add the repeaters. Okay, I’ll hush. Thanks.
You can, problem is the devices also need to talk back to it and the router doesn’t increase their power (but a good router with high gain antennas will receive signals from much further away). If you’re using an ISP router, a decent aftermarket one will probably double your coverage.
As far as a camera that detects at distance, the OG Telephoto is probably going to be the furthest due to the 3x optical zoom. But obviously the field of view is narrower. There are a couple threads here with people modifying Panv3s to also mount an OG TEL to it to have both near and far views with pan and tilt capability, but not sure how well that actually works in real life.
At sensitivity 40 one of my Panv3s will pick up headlights going by at 100 feet away (which I don’t want it to). If I turn it up, it will pick up those cars going by during the day. So maybe something is wrong with your cam, or maybe it isn’t able to upload the clips fast enough. Have you tested it with SD card to see if it captures more stuff? If so that would definitely point to internet upload issues. While I haven’t mounted them side by side, I find the detection sensitivity on all my cams (Panv3, OG, OG TEL for what is in the field of view, and v4) to all be about the same.
Thank you very much for your time and information. I’m thinking I will try what you suggested and if that’s no better, I will send it back for a replacement.
It’s me again. I just had a delivery and the Pan V3 didn’t alert me the guy was on my property until he was halfway down the sidewalk, Then it alerts me and says person and vehicle. When watching live, I can easily see a vehicle turn off the road and come up my driveway and it’s very clear. As you mentioned SD, I can back it up and see the same thing. Were you saying that maybe I should get an alert while watching it on SD? I’m not sure what you were referring to. The camera shows everything clearly , even what is going on across the street it just doesn’t send me an alert I’m to the point of giving up on it, and I’m sure you are too. Thanks again
If it said person and vehicle that means you are still using smart detections.
My suggestion was, as a test, to change it to “all motion” and see if that changes anything. Also enable “motion tracking” which is the green box that appears on the video, which will tell you when the camera detects motion.
If you set the SD card to record events only, then you’ll know what the camera saw as an event vs. what made it to the wyze servers and generated an alert. If the SD card has the events you want but you aren’t getting alerts or cloud recordings, that would imply a connectivity problem. In reality even if the SD card is “continuous” you can look for the green box to see when it saw motion and when it should have logged an event and sent an alert. Same thing there, if you’re seeing lots of green boxes or events on the SD card but not getting events logged/alerted via the cloud, it points to connectivity.
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I’m back. I just found something interesting. When I was looking at my porch V3Pan, I touched the pan control button and then it shows some events. One of them was a vehicle. That event doesn’t show on my regular events and didn’t alert me. It also shows some other events that doesn’t show on my main screen. Do you have any ideas why? Any idea how to make those cam control events show on my main screen and alert me? They’re there, but I didn’t get the message!
PS: I also did the “motion only” thing for several hours and it didn’t work any better. It did alert me to some tree motion and also would pick me up as I walked towards the camera from a distance, but only alerted when I got to about 20’ away. So, I gave up on that too.
Another PS: I did not understand about looking for the green box on the SD video. So I went back and watched yesterday’s full motion settings as I was mowing the front yard. The green box didn’t pop up until I was about 30’ away. The rest of the time as I was out further in the yard there was no green boxes. Your thoughts?
The events on the camera interface may be ones that did not trigger a “smart” event - i.e. was not recognized as a person/vehicle/etc.
30 feet is pretty reasonable for a medium sensitivity setting, it all depends how complex the view is, the more stuff in it, the more pixels have to change for it to be considered “motion”.
If the green box is picking you up, but not alerting you, then it is an issue with smart detections or maybe the alerts themselves. Every time the green box appears, it should trigger an “other motion” event (and alert if you have it enabled for other motion).
Another thing to check, in the wyze app make sure “running in background” is enabled, and in your phone’s OS settings for the wyze app, make sure battery use is not restricted. Before I did those things, I would intermittently miss alerts. Since enabling them I have not noticed any major change to battery use.
Two other things to check - make sure you don’t have a motion “detection zone” set (you can’t if the cam is set to pan/scan or track motion, but not sure if yours is). Also check your events screen to make sure you don’t have any filters applied.
All events that show on the cam’s interface (where you can swap back and forth between pan control and events) should also show on the events tab. If they aren’t, I suspect you have a filter applied.
Thank you again. Sorry I’m just now seeing your last reply. I did as you suggested and will hope for better results.
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