First off, thank you Wyze team.
Your products mean I’m only looking at replacing a broken window on my car, rather than trying to find my (likely stripped car) when I left for work this morning. I wrote a quick guide for some of my neighbors (given this is like a $50/20 minute solution to the plague of people trying to take what’s not theirs). If I’ve missed anything, or anyone sees things I could have explained/done better I’d be most grateful for feedback. I wasn’t able to find a similar guide, so hopefully this a) helps someone else and b) doesn’t break any of the rules:
Where I live (Detroit, MI), we’ve had a wave of vehicle thefts over the last 6 months. Most of the time, they break the rear window (as most car alarms won’t sound unless a door is opened while the vehicle is locked), bust up the center console to get the vehicle into neutral, break the steering lock and then push the vehicle with another somewhere nearby where they strip the car and leave it on blocks. Having had two unsuccessful (although in both instances problematic, as they broke important parts of the vehicles leaving them undriveable) attempts made on our vehicles, I wanted a solution to give me a heads up that someone was in the car which didn’t have many false positives (there are 4-5 vehicles that drive by our house every evening, every hour between midnight and 7am, so just using the motion function of the cameras resulted in far too many false positives. After reading somewhere that IR doesn’t go through most glass, I thought putting one of the Wuze sense units in the car might give me the solution I was after.
this is a $50 solution that while it won’t necessarily stop the initial damage (broken window in this case), should allow you to react to scare the thieves away…
First off, I installed the sensor in the vehicle, I chose the spot just behind where the rear view mirror attaches to the roof trim, as it has good visibility of the whole vehicle and is fairly innocuous:
With that done, I named the sensor in Wyze after the vehicle (in this instance ‘Explorer Motion Sensor’ - if you’re doing more than one of these, this name is important later):
Once I had the sensor, I created a rule (the … in a circle above ‘Edit Rules’ in the app from the prior screenshot) :
So that the motion trigger will only run between midnight and 7am (I don’t need to know when I return home that there’s motion in my vehicle :D)
Next, you need an IFTTT account (www.ifttt.com). It’s free to sign up and has no monthly fees. I use the Apple app, once again I’m assuming the android one is the same, your experience may vary. Open the app, sign in and click the + after ‘Make your own Applets from scratch’, you should see the following:
Click the + by This, type Wyze and click the green box that pops up. It may prompt you to log into your Wyze account. Once you’ve done that, you should see the following:
Scroll down until you see ‘Motion Sensor Detects motion’ and select it:
In the ‘Which device’ select the motion sensor you set up earlier (this is the first place where the name matters so you know which device it is), then select ‘create trigger’.
When you get dropped back to the recipe screen, click on the + by ‘That’
Type call in the search box:
Select ‘Phone Call (US only)’:
Select ‘Call my phone’ at the bottom (nb - you may get prompted to enter your phone# at this point - it was already set up on my account, so feedback welcome here)
You should then get the following screen:
‘Trigger message’ here will read out the name of the sensor and ‘TriggerTime’ the time of the event - so as of posting it would read something like ‘Explorer Motion Sensor detected motion at February 11th, 1018am’
Once you’re happy with it, click ‘Create action’
Slide the checkbox on ‘Recieve notifications when this connection is active’ and click Finish
Finally, select the recipe once more and ensure it’s connected:
Then, test. Make sure it calls your phone.