Its been a while since I had an IP camera setup, but recently came across the Wyze IP Camera which is only $20 …. The price was kind of a deterrent at first until I looked at all of the features packed into this small/affordable IP camera.

Wyze had just released version 2 of their camera so I picked up a pre-order, it took a few weeks longer to arrive than expected due to some issues with the production due to dust on the new CMOS sensor, the wait was ok by me as it was more of an impulse buy rather than something I really “needed” to get by on a daily basis.

My first thoughts, once it arrived, was that it had an Apple feel to the packaging. It was very minimal, clean and simple.

The setup was also very easy and done with all via my iPhone 8 plus. You simply power it on, wait a few seconds then hold the setup button which gives you an audible prompt to continue the setup which is all done via the iOS app. I am not sure how the normal iOS app setup is since I am running the beta version but I can only imagine it is exactly the same if not similar.

I really had no place to put the camera since it wasn’t really a planned purchase, so I aimed it out the window for a bit to mess with the settings, and since then it has more or less just been pointed at the wall until I find a use for it.

The camera itself does allow for recording to their cloud service on AWS as well as with the use of a MicroSD card you can record directly to it locally. I used a 32gb MicroSD that I had sitting in an un-used Raspberry Pi. Initially, I installed the card while the unit was powered on, and it did not detect it. A simple power cycle of the camera recognized the card and allowed me to format it using the app.

Inside the app, you can configure alerts for motion, as well as audio alerts and even has the ability to speak through the camera using the microphone in your app. I hope that I eventually have a reason to use this for something than monitoring the blank wall as it seems pretty featured pack for only $20 and would love to set up more of them around my place in the near future.

The one feature that I feel is really missing is any sort of built-in option to access the video stream via a specific port in the browser or to take a picture at a specific increment and have it auto-uploaded to a site via FTP. I think doing this would be great then you would not have to always use the app to view the video footage and could set up a nice HUD web page if you had multiple cameras set up.