Wyze camera vs tricycle stealer

[grapefruityoda]

@dave27

I recall some discussions here about people wanting to use them as dash cams in their car or something and people saying you’d have to connect them to hotspot every now and then to authenticate. I don’t remember the specifics. Maybe they just weren’t noticing that it was recording, but to the wrong folder.

I believe that was @K6CCC who tested V2, V3, V3 Pro and V4 on his truck (here). I had brought up that the 30 minute internet outage issue which was actually introduced in beta firmware 4.36.12.9357 for Cam V3. In that linked thread I was able to recreate the issue every single time on my V3 and I did the same test again with 4.36.11.8391 to compare. At the time I mistakenly thought the cameras required online authentication from Wyze to record properly. Anyhow, I brought this up with Wyze multiple times at various stages of different beta firmwares, but they still went ahead and released it to the public anyways.

@dave27

The cam may have actually started to burn out the previous adapter by constantly trying to draw too much current to overcome the lower voltage. If you have the option, running a higher gauge USB cable (even if you use a coupler and smaller gauge at one or both ends) should yield less drop.

That is very likely the case. My old setup was plugging a 33 feet USB cable into my old Floodlight V1 USB auxiliary port and it worked for ~1.5 years. Luckily I had a outdoor socket right below my Floodlight so I just used a more powerful adapter to provide a little more juice to account for the voltage loss and reused the 33 feet USB cable. I really didn’t want to mount a new cable. I could use have an extension cable, but it would have looked ugly mounting that with the power adapter.