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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Speaking about cheap cameras. I'm planning to setup some cameras at home. Anyone have any recommendations for devices that are cheap, can see moderately good in the dark, can be connected to a raspberry and doesn't force you to connect to some cloud service?

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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.

Thanks, I saw said article as I'm commenting in it's thread :) But I wanted to avoid the hacking and just buy something that I don't have to force into doing what I want but rather come in a clean slate.

Not trying to sound (too) snarky, but the fact that there is an article on hacking a camera to do that kinda tells you that a boxed solution to do mostly the same things doesn't exist :)

No worries, my initial comment might have been on the wrong post ("hey, I see you hack cameras but if I don't have time for that, where can I buy one with acceptable out-of-the-box behaviour?") but I felt the subject was a bit related at least, and I don't know any of them so I asked :)

Lots exist, just not cheap :)

Yep, I should've been more explicit, but I was counting "be cheap" as part of "mostly the same things".

Recently bought a Nest camera since it seemed like a DIY approach was going to be harder than I thought. Might end up returning it if I can get this to work how I want.

I have a couple of Xiaomi Yi cams, which out-of-the box stream to a mobile app, don't require a subscription, and will save video locally to an SD card. They are cheap and cheerful (but you would want to keep them behind a firewall). That said, this hack clearly offers a lot more functionality (I think I will replace my Yi cams with these and relegate them to recording raccoons in my backyard).

I'm not a conspiracy nut but there is something to say about how attractive Xiaomi's offerings are. For everything from phones, TVs, and other electronics; you would be crazy not to purchase it.

In there lies a hidden threat. Possible from a tiger nation state.

They don't even really advertise in the West much yet?

The surveillance threat is one that applies to any cloud-linked device, sadly. As a non-Chinese living outside of China I almost mind surveillance by China less; what are they going to do with it, after all? (Unless you count the Mariott guy they got fired?)

I don't think it's a "hidden threat" as much as it is a company racing to the bottom first.

Xiaomi has consistently shown that they don't care about security (or at least consistently enough that they have lost my trust).

I want to believe this, but I have never seen something about Xiaomi/security. Can you please give some pointers/links/events that happened before

I don't have any links on hand, but I know of a handful of situations that I remember:

* Xiaomi android phones had some kind of analytics APK built in around 2016 that would send a shitload of data over HTTP to their servers, and even would allow downloading emergency updates over HTTP. Their "fix" was to enable HTTPS, but leave the ability to force downloads and continue to run the analytics programs on the phones.

* Their robot vacuum used a password of "robotrock" to encrypt and sign updates.

* Their "yeelight" smart-bulbs were recording audio and sending them back to their servers over HTTP.

* Their "air purifier" also sends analytics and does updates via HTTP without any signatures.

IIRC many of these were fixed at some point, but I know at least once they said (paraphrasing) "we aren't going to fix it because the device isn't capable of HTTPS", but I don't remember which device it was. And it's enough for me to understand that they don't seem to take data privacy and security very seriously at all.

Xiaomi want to become an ecosystem/lifestyle provider, kind of a blend of Apple and IKEA. The margin on each individual product aren’t high (especially the electronic ones), but it leads to selling higher margin products down the line. I’m living in China and I now find myself buying Xiaomi towels and USB cables and pens and AA batteries and beer... since I know they will have an acceptable quality at a non-excessive price. Margin on all those is likely to be much higher than on that $30 IP camera.

Or, it's more likely that they only pay workers a few dollars a day to crank this stuff out.

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.

I've got the same thing going at home, tough to beat ~7 of these cameras flashed with OpenIPC for the cost of a single drop cam.

Got the rtsp stream connected up to smartthings and blue iris and have had zero trouble with them.

They're only $20 if you order from wyze.com

Does anyone know of a good Android viewer for RTSP? I'm probably going to proxy it with an HTTP webserver over TLS (if I can do that with RTSP? EDIT: Apparently I can't, I'll have to find a way to add authentication) to add basic auth, so the viewer will need to support that.

I use TinyCam on an Amazon Fire tablet to view my RTSP stream but only locally. Over the Internet I view the stream from MotionEye on my RPi using their authentication. In that case I can view it in the browser, no app needed.

Thank you, I didn't know of those apps, I'll try them now.

VLC is great-- it's what I use for viewing RTSP on my LAN.

VLC does the job but what you really want to do is run ffmpeg against it and generate HLS

They look the same as the camera being sold from https://openip.cam/ , but the price there is even cheaper: $12.99.

They're selling SD cards, not cameras

Ah gotcha, I read too fast.

Do you lose the push notifications when you use the custom firmware?

Yes you lose complete access to the Wyze app. There is another recommended app you can use to replace it called Mi Home but the point of this for me was to replace any cloud stuff.

That being said if you have a video server like MotionEye or maybe Smarthome has it (that was mentioned before), you can likely do some alerting based off that. I know MotionEye has email alerts and might have some other alerting that I don't use.

FWIW, I think you meant wyzecam.com. (Wyze.com redirects to Wyzestore.com which is down.)

EDIT: currently 2-3 weeks backordered on wyzecam.com and out of stock on Amazon.

What about wyze cam version 2? Will this work?

Looks great and I was started to look into it, but seems it's just within US (and even with that, probably only provide the power adapter for US plugs). I should have been more clear and indicated I live in the magical world of Europe (Spain specifically).

Thank you! I had no idea OpenIPC was out there! Going to be upgrading all my Wyze cameras tonight! This is amazing and EXACTLY what I wanted from Wyze!!!!

First time heard about openipc, checked its github, it is still just binary format though, thought 'open' means some source code...

Yeah, did the same. First reaction was regarding not finding any list anywhere of supported models, which is strange in itself. But the second point that they are still using a binary blob which no one knows what it does, doesn't feel very safe if you're worried about companies spying on you.

Is it? I see the whole file system layout on Github, or do you mean the firmware blob?

Can OpenIPC run on this Xiaomi camera? I just ordered it. Also, I'm assuming it's better than the software in this post, correct?

I’m pretty certain the Xiaomi and Wyze are the same camera, just in different packaging. Wyze is pretty honest that they don’t manufacture their own cameras. That being said, I think the software in the article is the same or very similar to OpenIPC. The web interface is identical. You’d probably get the same results with either camera.

Ah, fantastic, thank you.

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

Glue-gun on the seams and a few desiccant packets inside?

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.

Thanks! That's probably what I will end up doing, but the price will be much higher than just buying the IP Cameras.

I was able to find some RPi cameras on eBay for about $8 each, though they weren't NoIR. I also found RPi ZeroW for the official price of $10 (from pishop.us) and that combination worked well as an open remote cam for me.

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