I did the wire trick which worked for one but it wasn’t enough for this one. I used a shiny side aluminum foil reflector at the sensor and bridge both. Works great.
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What and effective solution! Thinking outside the box is often the answer we need. The reflector did you have provided what even be more affective if it were somewhat directional and that college. Shoot with perhaps utube or I should say Half of a tube lined on the inside what does shiny aluminum foil it would work much like a dish antennea does…
Bottom line: this is a great hack!!!
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Thanks!
I thought about that, I’ve made cantennas years ago. I didn’t want it to be quite that directional though, at least not on the bridge side since it still needs to pick up the other sensors.
Thank you for this clever hack! It actually works and I’m amazed. I haven’t had much success with sensors inside of my metal mailbox until I tried this. Now it seems to be 100% sending the signal through to the hub every time. I use this with Home Assistant but my sensors still communicate back to the same sense hub, its just connected to my PC instead of a camera.
I used a 25" brown strand inside of a cat 6 wire to match my brown mailbox so it doesn’t look too out of place. It’s fully insulated besides the small part that hooks around the internal antenna. Drilled a 1/16" hole on one side of the enclosure. Then I mounted it inside and ran the wire through a small hole that was already at the bottom of my mailbox. From there I tried to point it to the hub inside my house (not sure if that’s necessary or not but I did just in case). My signal in Home Assistant used to read -113 rssi and it was hit or miss, mostly a miss. Now it’s anywhere from -89 to -100 rssi and never fails to notify me of an open or close. Amazing!
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I uncoiled the antenna on one of my contact sensors that I use on my mailbox. I did it to see if uncoiling and routing it outside the sensor and away from the steel mailbox would improve the signal and I Went from 1 bar to 3 bars…So success, WooHoo!
Anyway, after reading this thread I measured it and it was about 5 inches, so not an accurate half wave which should have been about 6 1/2 inches if the frequency speculated here is correct.
Edited to add, it’s a stiff wire, not copper. It felt more like steel
Wyze Sense product page indicates 915MHz, so a quarter wave antenna would be roughly 3.25 inches.
I don’t have a sensor in front of me, but I believe that there was some type of antenna matching network on the PCB. Without a network analyzer, I can only guess what magic length, orientation, or shape of antenna will be optimally tuned. The empirical results reported here are good enough for me.
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I just got off a chat with support as I have a very solid network with wireless access points (2). One of my sensors wasn’t reliably connecting even though it was only about 8 feet away from one of my access points. Support is now using an app called RouteThis Helps. You install it in your phone and place your phone next to your camera/sensor and it takes reading that helps them determine your connection issue. Mine is congestion on my wifi channel, so I’m going to do a new scan and switch to another channel. During the chat session I asked if it mattered how close to the bridge my sensors were, and I was told it does not matter. It matters how good your wifi connection is to the sensor. So moving sensors closer to your bridge shouldn’t help. Getting a better wifi signal should help. These antennae hacks are probably improving your wifi signal.
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I drilled a small hole and uncoiled the one I was having trouble with out at my shed door. Also replaced the battery with a new Energizer. I was having the same issues of the sensor would send “open” notifications, but in the app always showed the door as open and never got any closed notifications. This took it from one dot of signal to two dots. Sensor is only about 25 feet from the bridge in an outdoor mounted V2 cam.
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Wow… so much wrong in this “support”
The sensors do in fact talk straight to the bridge in the camera. It has nothing to do with your WiFi. WiFi to the cam/bridge combo yes, but if a sensor is more than about 20 foot from the bridge, you will be gin seeing issues. RouteThis is shady AF, collecting all your network information and sending it to some 3rd party server that you dont know who is looking at that data.
RouteThis is just a way for Wyze to appear to be “helping” and then blame it on your connection speeds, your router, or “network congestion” to get you looking in another direction than their hardware.
The sensors use 912mhz to talk to the bridge, a very crowed space of other signals. Placing your phone next to the camera and running RouteThis only tells how well your phone is communicating to your router, not the camera. And I am sure that the engineering and signal quality from your phone is going to far out weigh the wifi integration in the wyze cam.
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Well, I may have been successful on extending the range on the motion sensor. I soldered on a length of wire about 12" long. The sensor is in a metal mailbox, and i have the wire routed out of the mailbox. It has a one bar signal, but that’s good enough for now. I have the sensor bridge probably 15 yards and one wall (inside) away.
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what about putting an antenna on the bridge? would that work?
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There is a thread on extending the bridge. Basically, just remove it from the camera and add a usb extension cable to the camera then plug the bridge into that. Appears to work much better.
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Sometimes the solutions are under your nose and so easy that you just miss them !!
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I think it would make more sense to figure out how to add a antenna to the bridge or hub to extend the range of all the devices. If you are still experiencing signal problems with a particular sensor then add a external antenna to that device as well. Just my two cents…
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That’s a great approach, improve the source and the extensions will all benefit
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
Is that a specific kind of wire you used?
I’m wondering if I could use the same for the motion sensor, that’s the one I need range for at the moment
I used basic speaker wire that I had laying around for mine and it worked fine.
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Where exactly did you solder the wire? I have almost the exact use case as you, struggling t9 keep continuous reception on my sensor because of the metal enclosure