Video doorbell endless reboot

Cameras
,
21

Most older doorbells run on 16v AC, newer ones often use 24v AC so that they can support longer runs (probably due to houses being much larger) and there’s a voltage drop as the wires travel farther. It’s perfect that the Wyze units can take the range of 16 to 24v.

They’re all AC - always have been. Often there’s a transformer plugged into an outlet near the furnace / fuse panel or somewhere in the basement/utility area, and the wires that power it come up to the door chime and follow through to the doorbell button on the door. It simply completes the circuit when pressed (like a light switch does) and powers the doorbell. AC transformers are the cheapest to manufacture because they’re simply two coils placed next to each other with different numbers of windings. Probably 5:1 reducing 120v down to 24v or 6:1 down to 20v.

Hope that helps!

22

I have a similar situation. Multiple attempts finally pass initial setup, App to doorbell is unstable, Doorbell lights indicate error mode. Possibly rebooting? Dorbell is 20 ft from WIFI AP. Multimeter shows stable 19V AC. Opened a ticket requesting RMA. Reply gave troubleshooting tips I already tried. Now 11 business days with no RMA. Not interested in sitting on the phone waiting for support.

23

Any resolution to what the problem is with the endless rebooting? Mine reboots every 1 minute 10 seconds give or take a second. Multimeter shows good voltage and there is no disconnect or voltage dropout at any time. Current draw is about 140 mA when it is fully booted.

Power supply - brand new 16V-30VA Hampton Bay. I also tried a 16V-10VA one originally. No difference.
AC power is correctly wired to electrical panel and is properly grounded.
WiFi router is 10 feet from doorbell and of course the signal is good. I have other Wyze Cams, Wyze light bulbs and Wyze plugs which are all operating properly. Only the doorbell doesn’t work.
Firmware: 4.25.0.233 (the latest firmware as of today)

I noticed that the activation date in the Wyze app indicates 12/31/1969. Not sure what that’s all about.

I

1 Like
24

Running into same issue as above. Also tested with a 16v 10va and 16v 30va with no avail. I can get through setup fine, but after that it beings going through endless reboots.

25

Best to call them up and get a replacement. You may have to stay on the phone a while and take pics of your wiring for them. Just got to be patient as they run through their questions. My guess is it’s related to time. 10 seconds to fully boot, 1 minute until it crashes. Maybe a RTC chip that is faulty and reporting a bad time like midnight 1/1/1970 GMT (Unix epoch time). It might be why the Wyze app shows an activation date of 12/31/1969. If the doorbell reports midnight 1/1/1970 and the app does a time zone correction that is in a time zone that is GMT -1hr or more you’d end up with that 12/31/1969 date. Who knows. I’m just speculating without knowing how the doorbell is designed.

26

Add me to the list. Similar to OP, initial setup was fine, connected to wifi no issues, updated firmware to .233. At some point over the next few days, the endless reboot started. I wish I knew a more firm reboot start time.

Attempts to ‘factory reset’ and setup the device many many many times would never stop the reboots, or allow any sort of access access via mobile app or get the chime to connect to the device.

Things I tried:
~ Using different wifi SSID network
~ Power cycling (many many times)
~ Powering up, factory reset, setup near my wifi access point
~ Installed ‘new’ doorbell transformer
~ Confirmed correct voltage at door, doorbell, and even powered it right off the transformer thinking maybe my wiring was bad.
~ Powering up while holding reset button
~ Many different combinations of reset button holding during power on, after power on, removing power during factory reset button press… etc
~ A bunch of stuff on the android app side. Deleted device from account, cleared cache, cleared storage, fully removed app, created new wyze account, tried adding failed unit to totally fresh app install with new Wyze account.

No success.

Interesting things during my testing:
~ 9v DC battery seems to be enough power to boot (though still endless reboots)
~ During setup on a failed unit, the “setup complete” phrase is ‘cut short’ (setup comp…) followed by a quiet steady ‘static’ sound that emits until the device reboots about 60seconds later.
~ During boot sequence, pressing the doorbell button will emit a ding-dong from the device… UNTIL, the steady blue light appears when the button doesn’t work and the quiet static sound appears. (software hung?)
~ While I could never get access via the mobile app, (it would never ‘connect’ to the device after setup and show video or allow config changes), I DID get what looks to be one initial device info populated page during/after setup, Here the wifi signal strength meter showed ‘no bars’ even next to my access point. New working unit shows full bars.
~ The device DOES connect/associate successfully to my wifi network, evidenced by my ability to PING the device’s IP address when the light is solid blue.
~ A working device has a service listening on port 10002. A failed device will only respond to ICMP pings, There’s never a listening service.
~ Activation date was accurate to my ‘first’ setup date March 9th 2021 and never changed.
~ Even in a ‘hung state’ quiet static, solid blue light, but unresponsive. I do see the device making ‘some’ internet connections to wyze related domains. And my network monitoring shows about 1MB of traffic to/from Wyze servers (various api related domains at .wyzecam.com). So SOME sort of process/service seems to be still alive/active and talking to Wyze cloud even in this ‘hung’ state.

My best guess is that the wifi hardware/software has a bug that fires right at the point it joins the wifi network (blue light goes solid). At that point the software hangs until a ‘failsafe reboot’ kicks in 60 seconds later. If it were possible to push firmware to the device during the setup phase (where your mobile app IS able to talk to the device before ‘setup complete’) I think you could recover the device.

Anyways…

Emailed and opened a support ticket, they were polite and responsive for a few days, and then ghosted me. Odd. Figure they are super busy, so I decided to replace the defective unit via ‘other methods’,

New unit works perfectly (so far). I’m going to leave it on the original firmware .202 and wait till release of firmware after .233 just in case.

I love the size and I’m still a fan of Wyze products and would not tell someone not to get one of these. I think this is more early adopter adventure. For the price, features, and size, this is pretty cool and I trust the bugs will get worked out.

fwiw

27

I had the same issue with the doorbell constantly power cycling and finally fixed it. My transformer was actually no where near my chime box. After I finally found the transformer, I saw it was wired for 8v instead of 16v. I changed the wiring to 16v and my doorbell is now working properly. I hope this helps others.

28

I was never able to get my original doorbell working. I returned it for another one and the new one worked perfectly.

29

I had the same issue of endless reboots and it was extremely frustrating. I have also completed all the connection checks and even changed my transformer to a higher capacity version - none of which corrected the issue. The good news is, I finally solved my problem tonight, the Wyze doorbell now appears to be working flawlessly.

My WiFi setup:
AT&T Fiber
AT&T router 2.4 / 5 GHz auto switching
2x daisy chained 2.4GHz Cisco Router (E1200 Linksys)

I suspect the endless reboots is due to WiFi connectivity, somewhere in the firmware the doorbell gives up and performs a soft reboot to see if it can correct the issue. This happens at least three scenarios.

  1. Using live view for more than a minute
  2. When the doorbell detects a person and wants to connect to the network
  3. Seems to randomly reboot during stand-by monitoring mode

During the endless reboots the Wyze doorbell was connected to my AT&T dual frequency router. The AT&T router does not have manually selectable 2.4GHz or 5GHz connectivity - it has a single login. I deleted the Wyze Doorbell from my Wyze app and proceeded to setup my Wyze doorbell again, this time connecting it to a single frequency 2.4GHz router. Voila! The Wyze doorbell is now super stable and not rebooting anymore :grinning:

I wanted to thank Wyze customer support for awesome service. While I mentioned the AT&T router, it does work flawlessly, the issue here is user installation error.