Last night we had a 5 hour scheduled power outage. I set up a Wyze Cam v3 connected to a power block, sd card installed, set to continuous recording. When I checked the card this morning, there was continuous recording up until the wifi router ran out of power on its UPS and then the footage stopped until the wifi router came back online when the power was restored. Once the wifi router was active, the continuous recordings to the sd card resumed.
It was my impression that with the settings set to continuously record, the v3 would continue to write to the sd card even when the wifi cut out. There was no interruption of power to the camera as it was plugged into a power block that was not connected to a power source, so the power interruption would not have been “seen” by the camera or the power block. The block also had over 30% remaining this morning, so it did not run out of juice at some point.
Thoughts on where I went wrong with my settings or some other reason the v3 did not continue to record to the sd card when the wifi went down?
I have V3 cameras that lose WiFi every day. In my truck that drives out of range repeatedly and the cameras continue to record to the µSD cards just fine.
I’m going to ask the dumb question because people miss this all the time. Are you sure it was not recording? What I mean is how are you trying to access the recordings - via the Events tab or via the “View Playback” at the bottom of the screen?
Not a dumb question at all. I was accessing it through the SD Card Playback, not the Events tab. I’m attaching two images that show the timeline on the SD card. The power was cut off at just after 23:00 and the UPS on the wifi router ran out just around 23:40, when the recording timeline stops. Power was restored around 03:40 which is when the recording restarts.
The last image shows the window when the power is out but the wifi is working and the recording is still active. All the lights are out but the v3 is still recording to the SD card.
That only makes sense if the camera lost power when the UPS ran down. Was the battery bank powering the camera plugged into the UPS, and could the battery bank have had a momentary outage when it lost source power - test that? The reason I ask is that a lot of USB battery banks have two distinct operating modes. One is when there is input power which is passed directly to the load, and a second mode where there is no input power and the load is powered from the battery. You would not expect it, but some have a pronounced switching time between the two modes when input power fails. The reason for this is that they were never designed as a USB UPS, but rather exclusively as a portable battery bank.
No, the UPS and battery bank were not connected, they weren’t even in the same room. The battery bank was not connected to anything other than the v3.
The fact that there is a UPS in the equation is probably irrelevant, other than it shows that the camera recording issue is somehow related to the wifi connection, not the fact the the power to our building was shut off. If the wifi was not connected to a UPS, but directly to the wall, it would appear that the camera would have stopped recording at the time the power went out, just after 23:00.
Strange. I have V3 cameras that lose WiFi multiple times every day - for lengths of time from a few minutes to most of the day. Last month I had multiple camera (including a V3) that had no WiFi for almost a week. All three recorded perfectly for that week.
This is a known issue with the latest firmware V3 4.36.13.0416. If you roll back to firmware V3 4.36.11.8391, then it should be fine. I tested this extensively and could repeat it everytime.
@grapefruityoda is right. It’s really annoying, but a few camera models now start to save recordings with a different timestamp when the internet goes out. The recordings are still THERE on the SD card [initially]…but since they have a different date and time, the don’t show up in the right spot on the timeline, so you would have to either scroll back to that other date and time, OR pull the SD card and retrieve the files manually. Both options really suck…
This issue started with the OG cams and it seems to be slowly infecting the other cameras recently. I suspect they are copying over the bad code as they do firmware updates and it’s slowly spreading to the rest of the cameras. We’re now up to at least 4 models that exhibit this issue and I don’t like it one bit. I am not sure why they don’t fix it before it corrupts all the rest of the cameras. We’ve reported it to them before but we slowly keep getting it to show up on more cameras and it’s not getting fixed.
At least the recordings are still THERE if they are really needed, but it’s annoying they haven’t addressed it. Maybe when they bring back fix-it-friday we will need to have a group of us just massively vote this issue to the top of their list so we can get a public report about it.
@grapefruityoda@carverofchoice thanks so much for the info. Hopefully it’s something that Wyze fixes soon. I didn’t have time to pull the card today to see if the missing timeline was on there.
Thanks again everyone for the trouble shooting tips and the information
I just checked the driver cam in my truck. It has the alleged bad 4.36.13.0416 firmware and recording me in the drivers seat just fine for my 80 minute drive home after leaving the WiFi at work before I got home.
It seems that this was intentional - reboot the cams after 30 minutes of no connectivity to try and re-establish connectivity. They’ve added this to more and more cams and often the firmware update refers to “improvements in reconnecting to wifi”.
Note that the video is recorded, but the app can’t find it. Putting the card in a PC will find it, but it will have the wrong folder and file names since the clock couldn’t be set, so it reverts to some old date and starts recording at whatever the default time is.
In my case I have reliable power and if it ever does go out and I need to see something, I know I can pull the card and find it. Of course the question becomes at what point will those files “confuse” the cam during normal operations and it won’t be able to overwrite, probably have to format the card after extended power outages (after confirming there is no video you need) to restore normal connectivity.
As others have mentioned, a few on here have done a lot of research on battery banks as UPSes for the cams. Or if you have multiple cams in one area, a cheap APC UPS might be a good option. Note that the cheap APC UPSes put out “simulated sine wave” power which is hard on typical wall adapters, so might want to upgrade from the cheap wyze ones to some more robust ones like Anker in that case.
It could be the difference in hardware variation of the V3. Perhaps Altobeam’s ATBM6031 and Realtek RTL8189 WIFi radio behave differently on that firmware?
@dave27 Yeah I went and re-did the test again. After 30 min of internet outage, it actually restarted the V3 camera on FW 4.36.13.0416. My other V3 camera on FW 4.36.11.8391 didn’t restart.
@shoehn FW 4.36.13.0416 also introduces a new behaviour. FYI.
