Wyze Cam Pan Helps You Watch Your House for $30

Article Comments
1

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/07/26/wyze-cam-pan-helps-you-watch-your-house-for-30/

The latest entry in the Wyze Cam line, the Wyze Cam Pan, can cover an entire 360-degree area for an absurdly low price. It’s well worth checking out if you’re looking for an interior security camera, but sadly, it doesn’t support HomeKit.

2

I bought a 2nd gen Wyze cam after your earlier article, and my opinion is that it’s not ready for prime time, yet.
Mine get more false positive motion detection alerts than real ones. I have a light on a timer (controlled by Indigo), that triggers motion every night. also lightning triggers it. Neither of these is “motion”. It isn’t bothered by the large screen TV in the middle of its view however, and that’s a good thing!

And similar to homekit, there’s no Indigo integration. I’d be happy with an email notification that I could send to a parser in Indigo so It could decide whether it’s a meaningful alert, or just me getting up from the couch to go to bed.
I’ll give them some time …

3

The 2nd Gen Wyze cams are great and handy. I have two mounted outside in protected areas. An ABS mounting bracket is available on Amazon. A third cam is mobile and is currently on top of my evaporative cooler so I can look inside to make sure it is working without having to open the cooler.

Thanks for bringing them to our attention.

4

Thanks for the kind words. I love that they’re so cheap you can use them for single-purpose tasks like that. One example they’ve shown is a lady putting a camera over her grandma’s medicine dispenser to make sure she’s taking it every day.

5

These look great! How far does the V2 move? I’ve worked with an Amcrest and while it doesn’t do 360° it’s pretty close

Diane

6

Mine would react to sunlight suddenly coming into the room. I’ve played with the sensitivity and it is no longer a problem. My main use is to look at cats during the day and to know when they are moving around.

7

Yeah, reducing the sensitivity helps somewhat.
But it still triggers Every. Night. when the light turns itself off.
The lightning trigger was also at night, so presumably because it was on night vision?

8

That’s personally not a deal breaker. The Amcrest triggers when a light comes on too. It also triggers when a car drives by at 4am (if it catches the headlights) and I’d assume it would do the same if someone had a flashlight while trying to break in!

Diane

9

I bought a 2nd gen Wyze Cam a few months ago and it generally works great for keeping an eye on my greenhouse. I had to dial back the motion sensing because the wind would occasional set it off, so I agree it was pretty sensitive out of the box. Also the statement that there’s no way to buld an automation to detect when you leave the house isn’t accurate. You can easily set up a trigger with IFTTT that will turn motion sensing on when you leave a perimeter around your house of a few hundred feet (though I wish I could set the distance to be less than that).

Paul

10

Any idea about the amount of data likely sent by each cam over internet daily or weekly under default settings for typical household. Just ballpark, as we have have rather slow rural internet with 30gb monthly data cap.

11

In HD mode, my camera bounces between 50-200 KB/s. In SD mode, it’s closer to 50-100 KB/s. Either way, it’s probably more data than you’d care to use. (I would blow through that cap SO fast.)

12

Looked the cam up on Amazon UK. £70 ($93).

I’ll wait.

13

Is it just me, or were they on sale last weekend? I swear they were $10 off - regular price was there but crossed off with the lesser price next to it.

Diane

14

How does everyone like their Wyze? I am considering a couple along with the outdoor brackets.

I installed an Amcrest last year and it’s great, but it doesn’t do night vision through a window at all.

I like the idea of the wireless outdoor Blinks, but they seem to be out of stock at the moment. Anyone know what they go for?

Thanks
Diane

15

It serves it’s purpose well, but resolution isn’t as good as some of the more expensive cameras I’ve tried.

I’ve found that it is maintaining contact with nine different Internet sites in the US and Canada and have questioned WYZE on whether or not that is normal, submitted followup information, but have not received an answer yet.

16

I believe it uses AWS for storage and processing - have you checked the addresses that it is connecting to ?

17

I read a review that someone installed it and immediately got hit with DOS attacks that hadn’t happened with any other cameras. I don’t remember if an update solved it for him.

How about any others? Another review did mention their Zmodo cameras had a better resolution.

I like the Amcrest but it was pricy, and not weather proof so night vision is essentially useless through a window.

Diane

18

I bought a couple of WyzeCams after the TidBITS article, mostly for my teenage son to play with. I have found they’re quite useful and handy. We now have a total of three WyzeCams, two WyzeCam Pans, and two WyzeCam Sense sensor starter kits (each has a motion sensor and two magnetic door sensors). I also have a pack of 4 Wyze Bulbs on order.

One WyzeCam points out a window and, no, the IR illumination doesn’t work through the glass. One monitors my 3D printer. I have a Pan mounted in my garage that I put in there to give remote help to some contractors, but left it because I have found a few uses for it (not the least of which is checking the inventory of bulk dry goods and paper items when I’m at the grocery store but forgot to check supplies on the way out).

I cannot compare them with any other cameras except a Ring doorbell, as that’s the only other security-type camera I’ve used. The Wyze app works much better (or perhaps just fits my style/expectations better) than the Ring.

I find that the product design and fit-and-finish are excellent, in spite of the low cost. Amazon Pay hosed up one of my orders, and though Wyze support was a bit slow getting back to me, they took care of the problem with friendly efficiently once they got to me.

Wyze offers firmware that will let you access the cameras locally via RTSP if you’re cloud-phobic and want to firewall your cameras away from the larger internet, though you have to be a bit of a geek to get it all working. I like that, though, as it means I can continue to use the product even if the manufacturer stops supporting it.

Overall, I’m quite pleased and will likely buy an outdoor cam if they ever offer one.

–Ron

19

Of course. It was the only way to report them. In addition to amazonaws.com:

  1. iotcplatform.com (198.16.70.58 and 2 other IP addresses) US, Canada & Netherlands
  2. agedbuddha.com (192.99.4.118) Canada
  3. Swedish-academy.org (162.255.116.92) US
  4. wyzecam.com US
  5. ? (192.99.4.118 and 5 other IP addresses) US & Canada – Same as 2 above
  6. google.com (8.8.4.4 and 1 other IP address) US – DNS
  7. ? Maybe IoT Messaging Service (MQTT)? (34.208.89.118 and 1 other IP address) US
  8. comcast.net (67.188.113.215) US – my ISP
  9. nist.gov Maybe Network Time Service (NTP)?

-Al-

20

A heads-up—Wyze had a security breach in December, with 2.4 million records of customer information exposed, including email addresses.