Outdoor Camera and Smart Alarm Camera Firmware 1.20 (December 2023)

Update has screwed up half my system. Outdoor cameras are decoration only now. Trying to reset cameras and troubleshooting lost doorbell cam and won’t reset up. Thanx. A lot of time and money wasted

Tried numerous times on each camera, same results. Cameras won’t connect to WiFi. Now doorbell cam won’t go back online. No issues with system before last update. Keeping services for panic buttons on wife and daughters nightstands cause I work nights sometimes. Cameras are next to my bed, cause I can at least throw them at an intruder, basically their only use right mow

Anyone noticed new problem with any outdoor cameras on solar power not charging since the 1.20 update?

All of my cameras are on constant solar power since set up right out of the box in September 2023. Ever since the new 1.20 update, my outdoor camera facing the front of the house drains faster but I have not seen the battery icon in the app indicating it charging and the percentage has drained down to 48% over a few days. The camera facing the backyard gets regular charging but does get less motion activity. Each solar panel faces the sky in the same direction.

I got up a ladder and checked the connections of my front camera and solar panel cables and everything looked and felt fine.

Did the 1.20 update change when/how it charges? 

@dlpsr 

Yes, there needs to be even more urgency for the devs to fix this bug! Battery draining and removing the ability to charge the battery from a constant power source is a huge security risk. We'll be left with dead cameras in the middle of winter and having to take them all down to attempt to charge each battery separately from the cameras, and climb all the way back up to reinstall.

The last mess of the 1.18 version firmware took them 4 months to resolve. Let's hope they don't ignore this new bugged firmware and drag their feet to fix this. 

I have noticed this as well and I understand that if the camera is awake all the time that it will drain faster but my right rear camera has not even came on today and it's on solar and it's at 86% and last night I had to take the driveway camera down to charge battery as it went down to 60% and its on solar but it's never went down less than 95% so looks like I'm gonna have to get a power cord for all of them except the right rear as there is no outlets anywhere on that side.

@davey_d Thanks for adding Performance Mode, but it seems to have drastically increased the motion sensitivity of my AC-powered outdoor cameras, especially in night mode. I've tried lowering the sensitivity and switching to "People Only" mode, but I still get too many recordings with no apparent motion, or with just dust blowing in the wind.

My front camera is still not charging at all and it's continuously draining. At random points of time, within the app, the app will show the battery charging icon and then randomly refresh to show the actual percentages in which the front camera never charged and the back camera only goes up to about 94-95%. Both cameras used to always charge to the full 100% before the update. My front camera is now down to 41% with hardly any motion triggers.

I firmly believe that your firmware update broke 3 of my 5 cameras.  I have a message that said "Base Station Firmware Successfully Updated"  and it is dated Dec 20th.  This is about when all 3 of my new model cameras stopped working.  I have two of the USB powered cameras that work.  However, those were moved to an area that did not need to be as secure and I put the 3 new cameras in their place.  In other words, my house is less secure now with your new cameras after the update.  Please fix or revert to the old firmware ASAP.

I have a suggestion.  You can do like our team did at Lockheed Martin.  If we rolled out an update and it degraded the system, we would revert to the previous version until the update was fixed, and fully tested.  We would also send an email or memo to the customer telling them that we were rolling out the update and to report any problems.  We also would have customers volunteer to be beta testers before inflicting it on everyone.  Some typical engineering best practice suggestions.

Just an FYI to anyone interested in trying: After I removed the problem camera from the app and reset the camera (pressed the flat round button next to the charging port for 20-30 seconds until I heard a ding) and re-added the camera, I noticed it rolled back to the 1.18 firmware version. So I'm hoping that will protect it for the time being from the awful 1.20 version until Simplisafe figures their crap out and rerolls an improved 1.20.

So did the reset button work?  Re-adding the cameras will really be a pain, but they are useless now.  The outdoor camera gives me motion detection but no live view.  The indoor cameras do neither.  If they can push out firmware that breaks the camera, they should be able to push out the previous version.  That is of course if the latest firmware breaks the function that allows it to be updated.  Let me know your results and I will spend waste a few hours trying to fix this mess.  Then I will investigate and alternative company.

I have been sitting this thread out for fear of being stoned but thought I would address those that have AC-connected outdoor cameras. The 1.20 firmware update has been very positive on my two outdoor cameras, with Performance mode achieving a 2-second flat wake-up to live stream and, to me more impressive, the added "pre-roll" feature, similar to what is on the original Simplicam, now provides recordings that start even before the person enters the field of view on the cameras.

Now SS, unlike my AC-connected experience, many customers on solar panels have asked, and are waiting patiently, if and when you are rolling back 1.20 on their outdoor cameras and can they expect a firmware update that works.

This is where an SS associate replies.

@chuckgrasser  So far so good on my end after resetting my front camera which rolled it back to 1.18. Front camera still at 100%. I get way more activity in my front yard so I wasn't going to let that camera die. I left the back camera the way it is at 1.20 since it gets no activity and solar charging wasn't affected.

Re-adding the cameras via the app was super easy though. The hardest step of the process is getting out your ladder to go up where you need to go to reach up and press and hold the flat button on the back of the cameras for 20-30 sec. You can either stay up the ladder to pull out your phone to re-add it or get back down to do it. The in-app process took like 5 seconds.

@captain11 

I'm wondering if you're an outlier example of how the firmware should have succeeded regardless of power source. Because from my understanding about the outdoor cameras, I thought that it didn't matter whether a camera was connected to AC-power or solar panel, because the primary source of power is the battery inside that camera. The outdoor cameras essentially feed off the battery only, and are programmed to trigger a charge through the USB port when the battery dips below a certain percentage. Either way, the camera is plugged to a USB source. The camera doesn't know if it's AC or solar. 

And even with the 1.20, I wasn't benefiting from the "performance mode" anyway. It still takes 7-10 seconds to load live view. Except for the new symptom of hearing and seeing the camera "click" on with live view. This update has resulted in multiple symptoms of malfunction in varying degrees across different customers.

Besides removing the Camera from the App/System and re-installing it. Is there a way to get it to update to the latest version? One camera did but the other still has not.

It's been a full day since I installed the new update.  I have two keypads and both of them needed to be updated.  As I mentioned earlier, it gave me a message I never saw when I tried accessing the camera.  "Working On It".

After that, all of the cameras were working again.  I accessed them periodically throughout the night & day and everything seemed to work again.  No Ladders Required :-)  It took a bit longer to fix than it should but at least it is done.  I hope everyone else has the same success.