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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

There's a virtuous cycle thing going on here: Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs (Xiaomi has a good track record here), 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, other people buy that product because it's much more advanced than competitors (because of all the extra software), profit for the parent company.

Basically, the company gets a bunch of people to do work for free, the product gets improved, the company makes profit, everybody wins.

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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.”

> 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.

A couple other reasons:

* They want to sell the same product at different prices in different regions.

* They're concerned about copycat hardware vendors.

Hikvision (and I think Dahua) seems to want to prevent people from modifying their firmware; as far as I can tell it's for these reasons. I really wish they would just open it up. I'd love to put open source firmware on a decent outdoor IP camera. The vendors' own firmware is pretty lacking. It's untrustworthy (proprietary software from a Chinese company; how sure are you it doesn't have backdoors?), written insecurely (probably out of negligence rather than intent but again who knows), buggy in general, has mediocre motion detection (not sure I could do better on their hardware but I'd love to try), and has mediocre H.264 encoding (likewise).

Xiaomi is, in general, quite good about opening its products up. The YeeLight bulbs, for example, have a nice open API.

Yeelight is just a startup marketing under the Xiaomi brand and is promoted by them, it's not technically Xiaomi. Same as with other branches of products (e.g. the vacuum robots).

It also happens that Xiaomi later releases products which actually compete with their partners (in this case yeelight and their bedside lamps). Also the whole Yi Camera brand. First marketed with the help of Xiaomi and now a competitor to the Mijia brand (Xiaomis own brand).

(Citations and more insight needed, that was just from memory).

>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

iRiver H3{2,4}0 was one of the earlier devices with a 2,5" HDD able to run Rockbox. Even with stock firmware, it supported OGG Vorbis. It sports a NXP ColdFire (previously owned by Motorola/Freescale).

I can recommend the FP2, if you can afford it, since its a tad expensive. Esp for the out of date hardware. But it is unfortunately not all open firmware. Then again, is there any 4G phone out there with open firmware? The FP3 should be out within a year. We gotta see what it'll have in store.

Anyway, nice list. Maybe mention the open source router firmware such as OpenWrt (EDIT: oh, you did. Well, LEDE merged w/them recently). PC-Engines APU(2) [1] also supports Coreboot. There's also a plethora of Raspberry Pi clones out there, many of which run AllWinner which is a PITA.

[1] http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

Thanks, I will remember to add to the list :)

FP2 is a respectable piece of hardware, by the way. I just never had it because I am too poor.

Very nice, starred! You might want to add the ESP32 MCU as well.

I actually have it on the list, but it was lower on the list because I thought it was just not as spectacular of a hack ("unintentional") as ESP8266 was. When they created the ESP32, they knew their audience :)

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?

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

There is a large exception for anything with a camera. Everything to do with the chipsets or sensors is under NDA and inaccessible unless you want to produce thousands of devices. I would love to be able to play with (say) a half-decent 2 year old camera chipset+sensor, which would apparently cost just a few $, but it's a no go.

For instance, the Raspberry Pi camera is entirely handled by closed-source blobs on the CPU and GPU. The best you can do is get cheap USB webcams from China for $20-30, but they're power hungry and you can't run them from a microcontroller.

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.

What does this have to do with making hackable products?

It has to do with the intent and why the virtuous cycle isn't always so benign.

We should really value companies that actually make products you can take control over, rather than blindly relying on lack of security to being able to do what we want. Intent is quite important. It also sends a strange message when lack of security is seen as something good.

Now I don't have any criticism/knowledge about this product or xiaomi in general. IP cameras are generally quite overpriced in my uninformed opinion and you still almost always get locked into the cloud. So I really welcome this hack.

I don't get how this can result into vendor lock in. Just don't buy the stuff that has it if you were first drawn in by "open" hackable hardware.

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

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