Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

You forgot the part where the company uses that profit and market penetration to stifle competition, lock down the hardware and lock in the users.

And boom, current state of affairs.

I wish more companies would allow this. Look no further than games, where the ones that are memorable are the ones that can be modded to death. Look at skyrim, kerbal space program, and lets not forget Falcon BMS (originally released in 1998 and still being updated to current standards by the community). Similarly, in ham radio, a grandfather to the current maker community, vendors have been releasing closed source hardware for decades to spite the advent of SDR and GNU radio. Because of this a small chinese brand has become a major player due to their software being dumped by some enthusiasts then extended and modified to run all of the digital modes with loads of other features. It seems that every time a company with a decent product releases tools or code (willingly or not) the community comes in and pushes it to the front of the line. I don't understand why this isn't more widely recognized

Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees.

If the company sets out to create an open platform and has a business model which works in that world, that is a beautiful thing.

Is that the case here and are we seeing a virtuous cycle, are features contributed back to the company and actually integrated into their product? I think that’s a beautiful model but I’m not sure that’s actually what’s happenning here?

Literally the first sentence of the article;

“...its price is cheap but in exchange you are tied to the Xiaomi’s Mi Home App & Cloud.”

On the other hand, they also open themselves to people just making their own versions of the product for much less.

If you choose them for their hackability, your core processors will probably have minimal development boards available for less than $2.50 each if you're using anything less powerful than a Cortex-M4 ARM core.

And now you have a huge part of your value proposition - the easy-to-use and user-configurable software - available for free. It will be cheaper for users to create their own version of your product unless you have some very complex or precise supporting hardware. End users will get a fun learning experience and customized product if they don't buy from you, and 3rd-party wholesalers will undercut you quickly and viciously.

So, hopefully your marketing department can pull at peoples' heart strings enough to make up for the order of magnitude difference in price. It works for companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun because they give back and people appreciate that, but how much room is there for companies that rely on goodwill to keep running?

>Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs, people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product,...

I maintain a list of such things. It's amazing when I researched, there is not a central place that does it.

https://github.com/htruong/hackable-consumer-hardware

A lot of the seller in Alibaba are just buying camera OEM from a factory so they wouldn't be able to get you the software. The factory itself might be just copying the reference design from chip manufacturer and they might not have access to the code or under a NDA. The chip manufacturer does not have an incentive to provide you custom firmware. You aren't their customer.

Yes, it's notoriously difficult to find who actually makes the hardware for these devices! let alone who writes the firmware. Many cameras are much too hard to reverse engineer in order to run your own firmware.

Fwiw, I recall that this is exactly how Dropcam started: they reverse-engineered the firmware for (iirc) an Axis net cam, then provided their own.

The trick for most device is to get a serial console and set uboot "flashargs" or using the init=bin/sh trick, grab the root hash, shove it through hashcat.

Dropping wire is the absolute best way to go, however:

A properly thought-out wireless system is the second-best way.

This might consist of P2P links, multiple access points, etc. over the subject property.

That's not to say this is expensive, check out Ubiquiti and Ruckus products for examples of the kinds of radios you need to make this happen. All should fairly affordable in comparison to renting a trenching tool and dropping cable.

We have p2p wifi between our barn and farm house. The barn is powered by solar.

I use engenius WAPs, a 100Ah battery, 2 100W solar panels, a $15 solar charge controller, various buck/boost converters for other power requirements. The system also powers an LTE repeater and LTE modem, to provide the farm with internet access.

I'm planning on getting a few Xenon from Particle to do something similar.

https://www.particle.io/mesh

I have a Wyze cam that I installed OpenIPC on. Very simple process if you’ve ever flashed a firmware before. OpenIPC lets you turn off the cloud stuff and I have mine pushing video over my local network to MotionEye on a Raspberry Pi. The Wyze has IR night vision but the IR can’t see through windows at night so be aware of that.

It was like $25 on Amazon, pretty good deal I think.

The linked article is a guide to "hacking" a $30 Xiaomi Dafang IP camera. This camera is an "indoor motorized WiFi camera capable of 1080P resolution and decent night-vision, its price is cheap".

If you bought one, all the "hacking" required is inserting a MicroSD card with a custom firmware on it and pressing and holding the camera's reset button to flash the custom firmware. From then on, the camera has the ability to boot from your MicroSD which can contain services that allow the camera to stream to local clients, among other things. More detailed instructions in the article.

Outdoors - anyone have any suggestion for waterproof ones? Both of these look indoor only.

If you're planning on connecting directly to a Raspberry Pi, the simplest option is a NoIR Raspberry Pi Camera Module and a few IR LEDs.

Anything involving automated camering.

at weenect we're working on gps tracker for dogs and cat, we have a g-sensor that put the system in sleep when the tracker stop moving and wake it up after a certain threshold. but we need to find some good "threshold" that typically won't wake it up when the dog or the cat sleep and move a little, we have some good values but we still some moves on our tests animals (i.e the co-founders dogs and cat) during the night.

We would like to know if it's due do an actual "the cat wake up to go eat/play/whatever" or it's just "the cat is scratching itself"

so with that camera we could image the camera always recording a stream (or by chunk) and when a move over the threshold is detected, it call something on the camera it copy somewhere else the last N minutes so we can analyze it without staying up all nigh :)

In the UK, that makes it cheaper than the Philips Hue PIR-based motion sensor, which is crazy. And while non-Zigbee, you could easily integrate it into an existing Hue setup.

It enables you to add more intelligence to your home automation because not only can it detect motion, if you offload the processing, it can enable object recognition.

So your cat doesn't trigger it. Or triggers a different action.

Because you can control the IR leds and filtering, you can mount it in a dome for ultra-cheap external pan and tilt with an external IR illuminator.