continuing with our three-part series on getting the most out of your Wyze cams
we're going to today extend outside of just the camera itself and into the
other things you have in your smart home
hello Automaters thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life
and today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation by helping
you get Wyze Cam extended because oftentimes Wyze cannot do everything
that you're hoping for with just as camera it does a lot don't get me wrong
but you sometimes need a little bit of help so today we're going to go through
a number of ways and and I'm going to show you better ways to use certain
devices than say just using the camera itself and we're going to start with the
Wyze sense system now the Wyze sense system is really important it's a twenty dollar
edition and they give you the Wyze bridge here and then a couple of contact
sensors and a motion sensor that all comes with in that pack but the sensors
themselves become really important in a few ways to extend this camera the first
thing that's really important about that system to me is the fact that the motion
sensor is a PIR sensor and this makes it inherently better at sensing motion then
the Wyze cams are and this will eliminate a lot of your false events or
your false event recordings going on in the Wyze system just by using that motion
sensor as the trigger for event so there's a little less setting inside of
the actual motion sensor itself you can go into sensor videos and that can be
then used to trigger multiple cameras if you'd like to start at recording one
thing that's really interesting about the motion sensor is it does not adhere
to that 5 minute cooldown that we talked about in the last video as being there
so when you have an event trigger off of this camera for motion or sound then you
have to wait five minutes to send another recording after that first
recording to Wyze's server so that no longer happens when you're using the
motion sensor from wise now what does happen is you have a cool down on that
Wyze motion sensor itself that's approximately 40 seconds long that you
have to wait between the first trigger and the next trigger so that's how long
your cooldown is with that but it's dramatically reduced that timeline the
contact sensor in many ways is more powerful than even the motion sensor and
that's because it doesn't really have a cool-down the only cooldown that that
contact sensor has is actually how long it takes to record the first video so if
you trigger a contact sensor based recording and then this starts recording
it's got to wait that 12 seconds before it can start another that's it that's
your only limitation to that contact sensor so it can be very very powerful
in terms of triggering those sensor videos if you have that complete motion
capture I should mention well now you've just recorded for a minute to the cloud
so then that's how long you have to wait to have another trigger of either of
those two sensors now with that Wyze scent system this is one of those little
tidbits that you guys really need to pay attention to turn off event recording on
your Wyze cam and the reason I say that is because then the cooldown if you have
an event triggered off of this camera that cool down comes into play in that
moment and you now have a five minute cooldown that has been initiated and
will hold so you can't get those cloud recordings so with why sense if you're
going to use those as the triggers turn off the event recordings for your camera
now there's a couple of other great integrations and I'm gonna give you some
examples of how to use these the Wyze bulbs can become the light in a
nighttime situation so anytime you have a contact sensor go you can turn on the
bulb or anytime you have a motion trigger event on the camera you can
trigger on the bulb and have it be the backlighting instead of that night
vision and that becomes important in times when you are battery powering
these dove because that night vision actually turns
on a lot of power requirement you could do the same thing with a wise plug with
a light or a lamp that was attached to it but you can also think about the Wyze
plug in terms of an outdoor IR light situation so in a lot of cases you know
when people want to put their Wyze cams facing outdoors what they often want to
do is put it through a window and if you do that what actually happens with that
night vision IR light is it reflects back and you get nothing outside so what
it's actually best to do is flood your outdoor area with another larger IR
light which you could put on the Wyze plug have it trigger at a certain time
and then just leave that night vision off on your camera and you'll be able to
capture lots of the outdoor motion going on the same holds true for the Wyze lock
now this is one of the newest products out there but you can actually use it as
a trigger event for your Wyze cameras in a lot of different ways so if you wanted
to turn on and off notifications you could do that if you wanted to turn on
and off the cameras or if you wanted to manually capture a recording when say
you're Wyze door lock opened closed or you can do the lock or unlock as a
trigger as well and what's really nice about the rules section within the whole
Wyze system is if you're using a device trigger you can also set a time of day
that you only want to allow this trigger to occur so you could even limit that
further to only happening say in the evenings one great configuration with
this for families is when everyone's at home oftentimes the door is left
unlocked and if that's the case or if you just generally want to make sure
that your home is locked at the end of the night or in the evenings then you
can automatically at a specific time lock that Wyze door lock and when that
occurs you can have your Wyze cam turn on as well to monitor in the evening
around that door lock and then you can also in
the morning when at a certain time again turn that camera back off and basically
you've monitored through the night with no trouble now let's extend outside of
the Wyze out because it's not all about these products and you're not likely to
only have these products inside your smart home at least not anymore now one
of the things that a lot of people will want to do is manually trigger
recordings with their Wyze cams through another platform and I use Samsung
smartthings you can see on screen right now all the different trigger events
that you have access to with that and you can get really creative there's a
couple of ways that I've been really creative including kind of bringing
everything into one variable that triggers my Wyze cam but what what you
can do is let's say you have a contact sensor on a specific door and the Wyze
cam is monitoring that door you can use if this than that to create a simple
applet so when that contact sensor opens then you will trigger the Wyze cam to do
a recording if you want to go deeper here and you want to really integrate
these two I actually created a whole video about virtual switches and a lot
of deeper integration that's possible off of that with Samsung smartthings and
Y so you can watch that that link is down below other integrations include
the two voice assistance now Google's voice assistant and Amazon's voice
assistant can both display the Wyze cams on their smart display so you can
actually ask your voice assistant to display your Wyze cam and then it will
come up now Google's is extremely sluggish right now to the point where a
lot of people say it's not usable now I've had OK results since upgrading my
Wi-Fi really looking at my home network and making sure that my cameras were in
good locations with good signal strength but it is still a struggle and we will
have to wait for Wyze to upgrade some of their cloud services before this is
going to get better this isn't the point of the video but that hold Wyze sense
system we talked about earlier can also be integrated really well
with Amazon's voice assistant Alexa and that's another video I created a little time
ago you can watch that video there's a link for that down below as well to see
how you can get those five and six dollar sensors from y sense into
Amazon's voice assistant Alexa now extending the viewing of these cameras again so
you can get them on those smart displays but the tiny cam Pro application can be
found on a number of different platforms and when you go and get that you can
actually manage to get your Wyze cams all up on one screen on say your TV and
that's kind of my favorite implementation with a fire I'm using a
fire TV cube but you could be using a fire TV stick and you can get all of
those up there it's a four dollar application there and you simply just
have to put in the right configuration now I'll leave a link to a tutorial
video for that down below as well but this is one of the easiest ways to get
your Wyze cams onto a number of different screens beyond this there is a
number of different and very unique situations that you can stick these Wyze
cams in and that is part three of our series now you can also go back watch
part one if you need to understand some of the basics of configurations and some
of the ways that you could configure this for your family but both of those
videos are up on screen otherwise you're going to want to subscribe so you can
see that third part when it comes out now guys thanks for watching today and
of course don't hate automate