Look at it this way…you’re keeping out little club alive!!! Sorry for your loss, though.
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Knock on wood, mine have been ok with firmware updates. Just left a new V3 overseas on its own, Starting to regret not leaving one of the V2’s i have and not using.
Wyze has expanded into so much crap, instead of supporting a few good products. The Android App is a freaking mess, more times than not, will not connect to the cameras, any of them. Hangs and shuts down all the time. Have to manually close the app all the time. just crap! Cameras that are on and working, but are “offline”. It’s like, every new version guaranteed to have new features (bugs).
I don’t normally “go with the flow”, but when I had those issues, I upgraded my wifi router and also added a wifi booster to reach cameras that were the furthest away. I see folks recommending the Mesh Routers, but I just got a powerful one and haven’t had any problems since. With that said, I live alone, so I don’t have a ton of things that are always connected.
Now, it is possible that I have no idea what I’m talking about and it won’t help you at all… I’m just throwing it out there to be thought about.
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6 v3 camera here with Red Light of Death (RLOD).
Out of warranty.
No yet plan to replace with the same version until this issue is fix.
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WHY doesn’t WYSE have a I-800 phone line for North American customers. Chat didn’t help so called. Was being placed on hold while the CR asked someone else. Finally told customer support doesn’t appear we aren’t getting anywhere so gave CR my email address. Email me when you have a resolution. That call cost me $30+ CDN. Getting close to $46 for new cam
crap, you may want to look at getting a new phone provider. Something like voip.ms, 85cents month for a phone line/ 0.002 cent minute calls to Canada/US. Or Even Fongo APP.
Wyze customer support hit or miss, you get one of good customer reps, you good. Most just read of a scripts, waste of time. Email seems to be slightly better, Many of this issues are firmware related, customer service has no clue and all you get generic scripts.
This was no funny and yet I am laughing my ass off. Well done sir, well done.
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(844) 999-3226
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I have the same problem with one of mine that went down in a storm not long ago. Other than the red light, it’s dead. I might replace it with a V2.
I have two Wyze V3 cameras with the red light issue, and finally I was able to fix them. The issue happened during power outages both times, each camera was working for a few months before that.
After logging in into the cameras I discovered that one of the configuration files, .product_config is empty. Normally this file has MAC address and a matching key (along with few other settings) that allows the camera to connect to Wyze cloud. With this file being empty, the Wyze application exits with an error message during booting process, before configuring the camera, LEDs or WiFi. Firmware upgrade from SD card actually works fine (and LED does become purple during upgrade), but with any firmware the camera would fail to fully boot.
While MAC address is printed on the camera, the key cannot be taken from any other camera and only Wyze knows how to generate it based on the MAC address. Luckily, the JFFS2 filesystem that is used on the partition where .product_config file is located has all the previous versions of the file including the correct file with all the keys. I was able to recover the contents of that file which was a bit tricky since JFFS2 uses compression to store file contents. After placing the recovered file where it belongs to, both cameras started to work.
I also noticed that on my newer camera (which also had a newer firmware) there was a copy of this file inside another file with MD5 checksum, and that file was intact. So on newer cameras (or cameras that had newer firmware, don’t know which one) recovery can be simpler without the need to recover a deleted file.
A good question would be why this configuration file gets deleted in the first place, and why Wyze is not fixing it. The file is marked as read only, so it is unlikely that it could be deleted accidentally using standard file operations from a Wyze application. It could be that it is a system issue, e.g. an issue in some part of OS that Wyze didn’t write by themselves (they didn’t design the camera from scratch) and thus they can’t figure out how it is happening.
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That is an amazing write up!!! Very nice provided details!!! So I wasn’t too far with my understanding of what was wrong eventhough I was completely going blind and only guessing.
What tool did you use to connect to the cams?
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How did you log into the cameras??
We were initially given instructions to format the SD card then add whatever firmware file that was desired. I would assume that the initial bootup would create the product_config file and its information at that point. I understand I can get the MAC addy from the camera, but how would we know the matching key if we are creating and pre-populating this file? Curious Minds Want to Know (sorry, an old 80’s TV show saying).
“A good question would be why this configuration file gets deleted in the first place, and why Wyze is not fixing it. The file is marked as read only, so it is unlikely that it could be deleted accidentally using standard file operations from a Wyze application. It could be that it is a system issue, e.g. an issue in some part of OS that Wyze didn’t write by themselves (they didn’t design the camera from scratch) and thus they can’t figure out how it is happening.”
Thank You for digging so deep into this issue. Your statement above I believe sums up Wyze business and product line. They are getting into so much crap of Alibaba they must be overwhelmed by all the issue and integration into Wyze ecosystem. Doesn’t make any sense to have cameras with so many different issues, that not only don’t get fixed, its like like they multiplying. Doorbell absolute mess, been for moths, new round of firmware killing cameras again, how can company afford to replace this amount of cameras??
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For the first camera, I had to open it up and connect the serial port as described at UART/Serial on Wyze cam v3 · Issue #134 · HclX/WyzeHacks · GitHub . In order to have a known login/password, I had to boot from SD card using this image: GitHub - gtxaspec/wz_mini_hacks: wz camera mods... make your camera better..
For the second camera I could just copy the files I needed between camera filesystem and SD card by adding commands to the boot scripts of wz_mini_hacks image without physically opening the camera.
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product_config file is created at the factory and is not supposed to change during firmware upgrade (or at all during the life of the camera). The only way to get the key is to recover the product_config file from the camera filesystem (every time the file is changed, the old version is not actually erased from the flash, but rather the new version is appended to the filesystem, so it is possible to recover the previous versions).
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So unless we’re Linux gurus such as yourself, we lowly commoners using NTFS don’t have a prayer of recovering the previous versions much less writing it back to it’s original locale.
I’m sure it would not be beneficial for Wyze to set up a program to send our bricks into them, have them recover & replace, then ship us our restored V3’s back again. Shipping alone would negate the expense of such a program, not to mention the 1 hour bench time.
Ah so it is… fleeting hope!
BTW, that was an awesome dive and write-up!!! Well done!!!
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I have 7 with solid red after last firmware push,… are we just out of luck at our expense on this?
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That’s highly unusual, how many total do you have? I’ve heard of 1 or 2 out of 10 getting bricked. What was the method you used to update? Did you do each one individually, or did you do a mass upgrade? Please look through all of the older posts above as there have been some good suggestions that have gotten “some” of them back online.
Wow. I have never had that happen after an update on the 6 I have here or the two I gave to my daughters. Mine happened during a thunderstorm and got knocked down with the structure it was on. I haven’t decided if I want to bother with getting it replaced or not.
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