Wyze Cam appears with different MAC address? "NovaElec"

Sensors
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Can anyone explain why Wyze Cam sometimes appears on the LAN with a different IP address? My gen 2 cam was reporting a mac address of c8:02:8f:xx:xx:xx and the manufacturer name “NovaElec”. It was, therefore, not getting it’s reserved IP address.

I see this has been discussed a few times in the past few weeks. One person mentions this is part of the startup process. Others that it’s a bug. My cam is on 4.9.4.37 and was offline for about a week with the alternate MAC address, all the while communicating with at least 4 different IP addresses–so this isn’t just a boot-time issue. I do not have Wyze Sense installed.

Anyone have some insights here?

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It is a bug in the startup process that occasionally occurs. Under what circumstances they aren’t sure yet. Wyze recently said they are interested in working the problem, and that people affected should submit a support request to help them narrow down the issue.

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Thanks, I’ll check in with Wyze.

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Here’s an answer from another thread-if you let the camera pick up an IP via DHCP at the c8:02:8f:xx:xx:xx address, it should pull down its firmware and update to a Wyze MAC address.

“Wyze cameras are manufactured in China. Most of the camera parts are purchased from China too. Nova is one of the suppliers for out manufacturer. When our camera boots up, it has an original MAC like c8028f. Wyze purchased our own MAC range which register under our company name, they start wit A4DA, 2CAA, and may be others in future. During our device boot time, our program will ‘overwrite’ the device MAC to be a uniquely assigned Wyze MAC. We have see occasional report of device showing as c8028f MAC. It is rare and not none. This is very likely to be the ‘overwrite’ failed for some reason. We are chasing the issue but it hasn’t been resolved yet. No matter what MAC the device uses your device should be functioning fine (unless you have one MAC address blocked through your network).”

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I submitted a support email on April 18th with a screen shot of this exact issue and never heard anything back. Only seems to happen with 1 of my 5

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Thanks @cbarth3 & @efnord. I put in a request; I’ll post here if I hear back. Sounds like I have to add yet another IP reservation for the other MAC address.

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This just happened to me as well - I had all of my cameras with reserved names / aliases in my router, but one of them changed MAC addresses and showed NovaElec as the vendor. Other cameras show IeeeRegi or WyzeLabs as the vendor. Super strange.

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Had the same thing happen to my V2
I also have reserved Ip addresses in my router
I did a factory reset on the V2 and the mac address reverted back to the original mac address

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I have now seen this happen on my network…