Unfortunately, the 1 that bricked was after an upgrade (back in Jan 2022), the other 5 I have upgraded without a problem, so it’s absolutely possible, just never heard of ALL of them bricking together. I always do my updates one at a time.
Yup, anything is possible. I always do mine one at a time as well, simply because I didn’t want them all going offline at the same time. These things happen to other appliances, as well.
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This fixed all of my issues. For reference my wifi password had an asterisk, an @ symbol, and a % symbol. Removing the @ and % symbols fixed my problems with scanning the QR code for both my single v2 cam and my multiple v3 cams. After changing my password, all of my cams scanned the QR code almost immediately.
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Wow, good to know!
Glad that it worked for you. I wished that reflashing the firmware was in the card for me
as a potential solution. Unfortunately reflashing any firmware doesn’t bring back the cams at all.
You needed files from cam1 which allowed you to not have to open cam2? If not is there any particular reason why you opened only one cam?
Also which serial adapter did you use for cam2? Home made, Armadillo, Raspberry pi, Serial to USB bridge, …?
Also I am curious could the password length be at play? My password is 16 chars long and I use @ as my only special character.
I recently bought a 2nd Wyze V3 camera to add to the one I purchased in Oct. ‘21. Older camera is working just fine. I installed the new camera, and it would keep going off-line after about 10 minutes, or less. When I start the app I can get a live video of my old camera within seconds, the new one cranks and cranks and may or may not go online, and when/if it does, it goes off shortly later. I would recycle, reinstall, power off, …etc. and nothing helped. WYZE finally sent me a replacement - same problem. Their customer support was trying to tell me it is because it is trying to connect to my 5.0 GHz Wi-Fi, but I know it’s not. I have an Orbi mesh system and I can go into my device controls and see which satellite it is connected to and what Wi-Fi signal is it using. It is using the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, same as my older V3 camera. I have uninstalled the app, powered it down and up, reinstalled the camera, everything they recommended and there is still the problem. Why would my older V3 camera work just fine, and the new ones both have the same problem, unless WYZE tried to fix something that wasn’t broken and screwed up the hardware or software? Old and new cameras are running the same software version and both have a SD card installed, old works flawlessly, new one is now a paper weight. Thought maybe the problem was the trial cam plus subscription, so I waited for that to expire before I tried firing it up again - still having the same problem. I even tried using the power cable and charger from my old camera on the new one, problem still exists. Then I tried taking it to my neighbor’s house and have him try to install it. He also has an earlier V3 camera that works flawlessly, and the new V3 camera had the same problem staying connected. Something has changed in the V3 camera. The suggestion to hook the camera to a smart plug to make it easier to restart is not a real solution to the problem, it only makes it easier to get back on line. Why even have one of the newer V3 cameras if you have to restart it every time you go to view it. WYZE needs to determine what they changed and reverse it. I will be returning the new one for a refund and forget about buying any more of the WYZE V3 cameras until this problem is corrected.
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I didn’t use any files from the first camera on the second. After learning what the problem is using the first camera, I didn’t have to have serial connection to fix the second. To inspect files on the second camera and copy the recovered files I just added commands to do that to the boot script on SD card of that wz_mini_hacks distribution. Then I’d boot from SD card, wait for a minute to make sure that the script has run, then turn off the camera, plug SD card into PC, and inspect the files copied by the script (or the results of the commands). That way I can “blindly” execute any command by writing results of the commands to the SD card. It is slower than having serial connection, but you don’t have to open the camera.
If you really want to fix the camera that way, I can give you some help. First, to see if you have the same problem as I did:
- Copy the contents of the SD_ROOT folder of wz_mini_hacks distribution to the root of your SD card.
- Modify wz_mini\etc\init.d\v3_init.sh file on the SD card: find a line with a word “dropbear” in it, and after it add the following:
ls -la /configs/ > /opt/lsinfo.txt
sync
- Insert the card into the camera, turn on the camera, wait for a minute or too, turn off the camera, put the card into PC, and see what is in the lsinfo.txt file (it should be in the top folder of the SD card).
Now see what is the size listed for .product_config. If it is 0, then you have the same problem. In this case,
Step 2:
- See if you have a file similar to MD5.201283764823ce81c321885f8eb1ee3243.config listed in lsinfo.txt. If you have it, you are in luck: it should contain a copy of .product_config contents. Then replace the 2 lines added earlier to v3_init.sh by:
chmod 777 /configs/.product_config
cp /configs/MD5.XXXXXXXXXX /configs/.product_config
sync
(insert exact file name there)
- Put the card into the camera and turn on the camera. If the red LED changes to something else, you are done. Remove SD card (or delete all the contents from it), and you can use the camera.
If you don’t have MD5.XXXXX file:
Step 3:
- Add these lines instead of previously added ones:
dd if=/dev/mtdblock6 of=/opt/part.dat
sync
That would copy the partition with the config files to the part.dat file on the SD card. You’d need to recover previous versions of .product_config from it. If you really want, you can send it to me and I can take a look if I can quickly do it, though I wouldn’t post that part.dat file on the public forum since it contains info that you don’t want to make public (mostly WiFi passwords and the key that would allow for somebody to see the feed from your camera without you knowing about it or making your camera inoperable).
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For serial adapter I used something similar to this: PL2303TA USB to TTL RS232 COM UART Module Serial Cable Adapter for Ardu-V6 | eBay
Note that some of the cheapest ones won’t work under Windows 10 unless you find the right (very old) drivers for it
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Now watch how that single message will make the thread the most popular in this forum!!!
Thank you a lot for the detailed steps.
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Finally got mine to recover today just using the standard wyze firmware and instructions. one thing I noticed is that after I would re insert the card into my laptop, the size was 0 bytes instead of around the 9.5mb it should be. I tried to transfer it again and this time made sure I safely ejected the card and after that, worked on two cameras that were stuck.
Great manual. Finally, I can see that the camera is not completely dead.
The red light disappeared when the wz_mini_hacks SD was inserted.
But in my case, the config folder is empty:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 1000 1000 3 May 13 2022 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 1000 1000 283 May 13 2022 …
Is there any option to recreate the product_cofig file?
Thanks,
Ari
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Would be nice if we could just download a file like that to put on the card to make the cam work again.
The only option I see is to try to recover deleted files from the filesystem. If you want to, get the part.dat file as described in step 3 and send it to [Mod Edit].
[Mod Note]: Personal information has been manually removed from this post. Please use the Direct Message feature to communicate private information.
I have parts.dat on the SD card. I’m fairly Linux savvy. Is the process to recover the deleted files complicated?
I’m curious too. Is it possible to transfer the files from one card to the other? I might have deleted the files in the “broken” cam after using the card elsewhere.
I used the tool from GitHub - sviehb/jefferson: JFFS2 filesystem extraction tool as a starting point. Once I figured out what inode number I need to to get the previous versions of, I modified the code to ignore the checksums and JFFS2_NODE_ACCURATE attribute and print out the contents of all versions of of the given inode number.
The SD card does not have any important files, so it doesn’t matter if you deleted anything on the card. The configuration files are on the flash chip inside the camera.
The configuration file that is deleted is unique for each camera, so it is not possible to reuse one from another working camera.
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Ok thank you.
I was looking at that repo when I noticed you said it was JFFS2. I’ll give it a shot.