“Creative” ways to use a $30 Wyze camera | Hacker News Reader

“Creative” ways to use a $30 Wyze camera

technicallychallenged.substack.com

12 pointskoinedad13 comments

I want an AI that watches my sourdough starter and notifies me the moment its rising has peaked.

Seems to me like something you could quite easily and cheaply build with an arduino and an ultrasonic sensor. Just have it measure how high the top of the starter is and sound a buzzer whenever it's no longer going up.

Making it rugged and able to notify in a non annoying way wirelessly could be harder than Wyze AI.

I setup text notifications with the Telegram API for a rasp pi project pretty easily and it is free which is a bonus

I would try with a TOF sensor and an esp8266/esp32.

I actually thought this same thing maybe building this it a raspberry pi and camera.

They should have added other items to the list: fueling one's own descent into paranoid schizophrenia, giving a false sense of security, a waste of $30 bucks.

It's not a false sense of security, it's a minor deterrent with the possibility to put them in jail if not deterred.

I think you need at least 3 of them to properly start a descent into paranoid schizophrenia.

So you can't just own a security camera now. Gotcha.

My Wyze camera has already paid for itself when it caught a delivery driver backing into (and partially wrecking) my mailbox. Their insurance paid up.

Really my only complaints with the camera are:

* It randomly decides to turn off my “lite” camera subscription in the app so I have to reset it up

* Too much pestering to upgrade to a monthly plan in the app

* Camera doesn’t come in black

* Can’t read license plates (but higher end cameras have trouble with this too)

I notice that in the link to the RTSP "beta" firmware wyze have removed it completely, so there's no option to use an open protocol any more?

Ah that’s a bummer, I was looking to try it soon!

I think the only option for that is flashing custom firmware, which i am not sure can be done on the most recent hardware revisions.

https://github.com/openmiko/openmiko

https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks

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