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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

This is actually one of many reasons I started my own project to rewrite some of the firmware on an IP camera that I bought (WyzeCam). I wanted something open where I owned most of the stack and could customize as needed. I'm not as worried with a hardware level backdoor but firmware backdoors and/or just bugs are more worrisome. It has been a great learning experience working on the embedded side.

If anyone is interested this is the project: https://github.com/openmiko/openmiko

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FYI the pine64 has an open source camera called pine cube launching soon(ish?) https://www.pine64.org/cube/

Cool! I wonder how much it will be. The Wyze/Xiaomi cams are MIPS 32 bit and the pine cube is ARM. Also the pine cube seems to have a better wifi and more flash. Wyze only has 16 so it can be a tight fit. Also bluetooth and PoE. All very nice additions but I wonder if it will push it over the $20 price point for a cheap IP cam.

>PineCube (formerly CUBE) going into production soon, with improved hardware specs; available in 6-8 weeks for ~$24.99

Apparently it's gonna cost 20-30$ :)

Wow. I wonder if I can preorder. I can't seem to find a link.

https://www.pine64.org/cube/

This is the store page but it's not available to order yet. Your best bet is probably following their news blog .

It doesn't seem to have a hardware based H264 encoder though. Or maybe I am missing it?

Very nice. I had used DaFang Hacks previously to get RTSP support, but now WYZE provides a semi-official RTSP firmware so I've been using that (and it's much better than DaFang Hacks). It looks like you've recently added RTSP as well. I've give it a try!

I don't really get why IP cameras don't run RTOSes on the application processor. It seems like the schedules are basically fixed anyway.

Could be an area of exploration.

Maybe when the Pine64 Cube is out, I'll take a crack at it, maybe on Tock if its scheduler can do what I want. It looks like most or all of the required drivers are in upstream linux, which should take some of the mystery out of it.

I would love to get to the point where my IP cameras just dump MPEG-DASH streams into B2, ready to be streamed directly into a browser or mpv.

I would probably say time to market and cost are the driving factors. I imagine supporting RTOS semantics to be an order of magnitude harder?

> I imagine supporting RTOS semantics to be an order of magnitude harder?

You can still do mixed scheduling on an RTOS, but it gives you the tools to avoid underruns or underprovisioning the static tasks (copying and transmitting video).

I guess maybe if you're pulling from the camera rather than pushing from it, then maybe it could be harder.

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