Wyze Cam Pan for a total and complete noob

First and foremost I am new to home automation in its entirety. I have absolutely zero coding experience and frankly limited knowledge of most of this stuff.

I have 3 wyze cam pans that I want to integrate into my dashboard (if I can figure out how to even get one to work) for my tablet. Can someone point me in the direction to get one of these working on a dashboard?

I'd like to only be able to view these devices on the dashboard, I don't care about person detection or notifications or any of that happy jazz.

I don't believe there is a workable way to do this, the Wyze system is not an open api afaik (closed-off , ie, they want you to live in the Wyze app).

A while back they released an experimental firmware that allowed local-network (non-cloud) connections via rtsp, but when I evaluated it I found the performance was really bad.

There's also a 3rd party firmware hack 'dafang' that attempts to provide similar functionality, but it is very convoluted to setup and also had terrible performance when I tried it a bit over a year ago.

The last RTSP update for the v2/pans (early this year) improved things a lot and it's now quite useable.

First, can't be done stock.

Second, even with the RTSP firmware installed you can't do that directly with the RTSP stream and will need to convert it to an mjpeg one. There are android apps (tinycam) or raspberry pi (motioneye) that can do the conversion. Some threads that might be helpful:

Wyze Tinycam Video URL on Dashboard??
Putting live video from (almost) any webcam/ip camera into your dashboard?

alright...so wyze sucks for Hubitat.

What works? I care about price, yes...but I also care about the PTZ portion of those cams, and being able to see them from my phone outside of my network. I'm willing to even host a NVR system on my server....I need PTZ...

The wyze cams still work fine on the app with the RTSP firmware. I understand the motion detection features aren't available due to supposed memory constraints.

I'm cool with that. Basically I'd be watching my property live, my kid when she sleeps, and so on.

Can I accomplish this with wyze and hubitat?

If you just want a NVR system with PTZ support then that is what you should buy. Hubitat might allow you to display a thumbnail but you'll be disappointed trying to do anything with the thumbnail. If you have the skills, time and money Hubitat can be used but it is not simple (and for me, not particularly useful). Some NVR software might control the Wyze Pan Cam PTZ but you are going to spend a lot of money to get a cheap cam working and even then it's not that great a camera.

For the RTSP install instructions/firmware are available on the wyze website. Once installed you should be able to access the camera as per normal from your phone app (except for the motion detection features which have been removed - the wyze site will describe what you don't get anymore.)

Then you'll need to read through the threads I linked to (there are more on the forum - a search for wyze will help) to set up tinycam (requires an android/ios phone - I'm sure you'll have an old one lying around, or a raspberry pi for motioneye). If you get stuck please post back and I'm sure we can help you through. Note that this is for displaying video on a dashboard. Note that the dashboard video tile is not true video - it's a series of 1s snapshots so effectively 1fps unless you use iframes.

However, the harsh reality is that HE isn't really suitable for video surveillance. If you need this then go all out for a proper integrated system for minimal set up hassles.

no no no I don't want to be able to control them from the dashboard, just view the feeds. I have no issue using the app or tiny cam to move cameras when needed.

perhaps hubitat isn't for me. This should be complicated with any hub software. I'll look into home assistant. Not being able to easily few the feeds is a deal breaker for me.

I am really confused. Wyze has a native app specifically for viewing and controlling their cameras. It works quite well, actually. Why are you hoping to emulate the exact same functionality on another platform that was built for a different purpose? I expect that I am missing something, but do not quite know what it is.

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I think perhaps it might be me and not you. I was under the impression that there was a way to take all of your "smart" devices in your home, and view and control them on one dashboard. I know this comes off as sarcasm, and I promise, I mean it without. I want to be able to control my lock, lights, thermostat, see weather in my area, and view the live stream from my cameras....all on one dashboard. I don't care what software it is, thats what I thought I was getting from stuff like Hubitat or HomeAssitant...

I have found through some reading on the forum and other places that it seems like most home automations do not really have a good way to handle cameras without a bunch of extra messing around. I personally only have Hubitat and alexa. I have two Wyze cams and one Ring doorbell. Neither integrates that great with Hubitat or even Alexa for the video feeds. I use the Wyze and Ring apps to view the video.

Possibly a little known fact is that you can create a "group" in Wyze with I think 4 cams in it that you can all view at once. You hit the + in the top corner of the app and create a group. I just found this out last week after owning the cameras for a couple months now.

Otherwise if you dont like that software I would reflash the Wyze cams with the RSTP firmware they provide and then you can use other software to setup your own dashboard.

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Hubitat is able to do all these. However simple cameras such as Wyze cams, Arlos, Eufys etc are not meant to constantly stream video due to battery constraints (arlo/eufy and similar cameras) or use wifi (bandwidth usage). Most common protocol for streaming is RTSP as it is fairly efficient but unsupported on the wyze cam on the stock firmware. (it won't matter if you switch to HA, you'll still have to have the RTSP firmware although HA is able to display the RTSP stream without external help).

I have a few wyze cams which I display on my dashboard using motioneye running on a raspberry pi. Works pretty well, although the real kicker is that using node red on the same pi I am also able to automatically maximise any feed to full screen if a linked motion or other sensor is triggered. You could (maybe) do the same with HA but I doubt it would be any easier.

Actually I was like that when I first started. However that would be missing out on the automation part of home automation. My primary dashboard these days runs on a small nest hub and displays 4 camera feeds, weather+radar, key status indicators and only a few light switches (mostly there if I want to overrride automations. I do have a big dashboard but that runs on my desktop for me to do troubleshooting mostly.

Anyhow good luck in whichever way you head. The community here is pretty helpful so that's a plus!

I got the RTSP streams coming from the cameras themselves by using the Wyze supported RTSP setup on the cameras themselves. Somehow motion tagging still works too.

I might have to look into HA if its easier to get the RTSP to work on the dashboard...

Did you try this, which was linked above?

Your Wyze cam pans are supported by tinyCAM and then you can take the video feed from that straight into an HE dashboard using an image tile. It's easy to set up, tho' you do need a spare always on android device to run tinyCam (tablet or phone will do). And by the way, although I know from your comments above you are not looking for it, you additionally can set up motion sensing and even AI object detection (vehicle, person, face, pet) straight into HE using TinyCam too;