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Comment by kn100 | Hacker News Reader

You make a good point - but let's be careful to not confuse personal hackery with random internet connected shit you buy from the internet. In my ideal world, every IoT product would directly and clearly document it's hardware, along with allowing the user to replace the firmware with whatever they wanted, so users like me can opt out of the cloud driven solution.

The nice thing about a hack like this is you, the creator, have full control over exactly what is exposed or how. There's no cloud, no external control, no unwanted firmware updates, nothing. If everybody was willing and capable to engage with their hardware at this sort of a level, there wouldn't be this crisis of insanely insecure hardware being sold to uncaring consumers, imo!

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One thing I've learned when dealing with cheap PoE CTV cameras, is that there really are only a very few IoT chipsets for various things, everyone seems to be using the same ones (except for a subset of boutique ones reusing off-the-shelf more complicated ARM processors or Raspberry Pis or whatever).

I'd love to see that more standardized and things like OpenWRT for all sorts of IoT junk, giving back control. Opinionated things like Valetudo https://valetudo.cloud

Y'know what I'd love? For all IoT crap to feature a socketed ESP32 or whatever. The vendor can ship whatever garbage software they want to it, but maybe in the future when Wifi 2.4ghz does eventually die as an example, we could all just swap the controller chip with one that supports 5ghz wifi. This will never happen since the world prefers us to throw all that crap out to buy new crap, but it's nice to imagine!

This is impractical for a couple of reasons: 1) Socketed chips add significant cost in a number of ways as compared to CoB or just standard soldered chips 2) This would likely violate most FCC/CE/C-tick/etc. certifications. 3) The whole assembly would need to be designed to be field servicable so you could access the circuit boards, which would also add cost (and possible warranty issues).

In the end, building a product that could properly facilitate this would just wind up costing more than viewing them as disposable units that you toss out when a newer version of something is available. This is optimal from a capitalism standpoint, but suboptimal from a sustainability standpoint.

> 1) Socketed chips add significant cost in a number of ways as compared to CoB or just standard soldered chips

Yep, that's probably true.

> 2) This would likely violate most FCC/CE/C-tick/etc. certifications.

IANAL but that doesn't seem like it can possibly be necessarily true, since most computers let you replace the motherboard and wifi card.

> 3) The whole assembly would need to be designed to be field servicable so you could access the circuit boards, which would also add cost (and possible warranty issues).

Not all, but most IoT boxes I've seen already are easy enough to take apart, it's just that there's not much to do with it once it is apart. So I don't think this would be a change.

I'm not saying any of it is impossible, just that it is costly (based on my direct experience at a number of hardware companies).

For an "IoT box" type of product there would likely be fewer issues with the certifications and swapability.

For IoT devices like light switches, bulbs, smart outlets, or anything else where the 120V/240V power is exposed vs. isolated by a power supply (as in the case of a PC or "IoT box") it would likely be too costly to do in a conformant way. Particularly when the tinkerer consumer base that would actually value this is maybe 5% of the total market.

Better yet, just require it to publish full source code after some embargo period, maybe 8 years. Managed by an independent accounting firm. Also require a standard programming port.

This would be okay for iot bricks but more useful for laptops. Company gets X years of secrecy and when they abandon support, they open up the secure enclave and let FOSS devs go to town.

Any recommendations for ONVIF-compliant cameras for home use?

I've tried a handful of used hikvision / dahua in the ~100usd range but they don't play nice with anything other than the vendor's software. Like VLC / open source VMSs can't play the RTSP stream. And even then, its a crapshoot whether features like stream configuartion or PTZ work.

I know the ONVIF group publishes a list of verified-compliant models but it's been a pain trying to find one that's affordable and in stock.

I've heard from devs that work on this stuff that most of this pain stems from how loose the ONVIF spec is. Too many optional features (even per "profile"), too vague on requirements, leading to lots of vendor-specific metadata / camera quirks.

I went through a bit of a spat with cameras, and had luck with things from Amcrest, Reolink, and various similar ones on Amazon. All worked with VLC over RTSP, though I didn't go deep into PTZ setups.

What I did was go to them via the https://forums.zoneminder.com and looked for recent posts.

It's even more of a crapshoot because some of the cameras were absolute shite until I found some sketchy Chinese firmware of a particular version, which made them suddenly beautiful.

All of these are very securely cordoned off and unable to contact the Internet at large, of course.

Is Zoneminder your main interface? I've been using it for several years with a few Reolink 5MP cameras, and maybe it comes down to choices I've made which I should revisit, but it's painfully slow (say, 30 seconds) to start playing, or seek within, an event video. I record only events.

I am now experimenting with the RLN36 NVR instead, and thinking about having enough disks to record continuously instead of events only.

Ideally I want continuous recording, and I want a timeline of events that aren't separate files, but are just shortcuts to alarm times within the continuous recording, with minimal seek delay. Interface must be friendly to small screens (phone size) which the RLN36 web UI isn't particularly. Maybe the zmNinja app.

I used zone minder for a bit until I realized I don't actually care about recording at all for my use cases, now I just directly VLC to the camera itself.

If I were to set it up again, I'd go further down the home assistant path (one camera I got setup so it appears in HomeKit, but I never bothered getting the rest).

I am using the ones from SRICAM brand. The quality is not great, but they are cheap and they work well with ONVIF and motion.

Reolink+annke work with onvif in VLC and Shinobi on my side, but I had to turn off h.265 to get it working in Shinobi (worked fine in VLC)

My comment is maybe too-indirectly implying that these skills end up getting applied in careers where surveillance is added on top of these sorts of connected processes. The hobby can be as benign as we like, but paychecks change what people are willing to tolerate...

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