One of my Wyze V2 cameras either arrived with dead IR hardware or failed early on in its tenure here, but it simply didn’t work in night-vision mode: the IR LEDs didn’t turn on and the IR-cut filter didn’t move. Neither the Official Wyze App nor the Xiaomi-Dafang Hacks firmware had any effect, so I expected a (possibly simple) hardware problem.

The first hint of trouble was finding the case had only one of the two screws securing its bottom lid, with the missing screw having never been installed. Removing the single screw and prying a bit popped the lid, revealing the innards:

The rear panel (on the right) comes off after abusing the snaps holding it to the main case:

That’s best done with a small, designated Prydriver, rather than a screwdriver to which you have a deep emotional attachment.

The corresponding part of the main body shows less abuse:

The black patch is the WiFi antenna, which you must unplug from the top board before going much further.

The small blue wedge below the antenna gave me hope I’d found the root of the IR problem:

Everybody has trouble with those delicate ribbon cable socket clamps!

While I had the case open, I extracted everything and looked it over:

The IR LED soldering left a bit to be desired, so I touched up those joints and washed off most of the flux.

Alas, the IR hardware still didn’t work with everything stuffed back in the case. There are worse things than having a small daylight-only IP camera, though.

So it goes …

Once again, the Memory Stick socket cable in my trusty DSC-F717 camera became erratic, leading to continuous C:13:01 “format error” crashes, so I tore it apart. Proceed as before, until the camera carcass disgorges the socket:

Gently pry the metal cover outward to clear the latches along the sides:

The cover remains held in place by two tabs inside the holes on either side of the Memory Stick contacts, one of which is already free in the previous photo:

The small spring on the left ejects the Memory Stick and will, if suitably provoked, launch itself across the bench. Be prepared!

Use a pointy instrument to ease those tabs away from their latches and pop the top:

I cleaned the contacts, not that they appeared particularly filthy, gently bent them upward by three micro-smidgens to apply a bit more pressure to the card’s contacts, and reassembled the socket in reverse order.

I put a strip of Kapton tape on the back of the cable termination paddle (shown here during the previous repair) to ensure a snug fit:

Unfortunately, I snapped off a locking tab on one of the ribbon cable connections to the main board:

The cable threads through the middle of the clamp, which then slides into the socket and applies pressure to the contacts through the cable: no clamp, no pressure, no good.

For lack of anything smarter, I tamped the clamp into the socket and applied a strip of Kapton tape to maintain everything in more-or-less the right position:

Definitely unpretty, but better than nothing. While I was in there, I reinforced the other connections with similar clamps.

Reassemble the camera in reverse order and it’s all good:

It probably won’t last another decade, but ya never know …