Hacker News Reader

Comment by OptionOfT | Hacker News Reader

I got one of those indoor gardening systems. We thought we had an issue with them. Contacted support.

Support checked and it was fine. Just needed time to adjust. They mentioned they checked the cameras (!).

Later on I got a second used one and while cleaning it, noticed that the internals are just a raspberry pi. Took my micro HDMI and keyboard, and... this thing just runs Raspberry Pi OS.

No updates. And ... VNC. People from that company can just remote into my device, look at what the cameras are seeing, and do stuff on my network. These things are a security nightmare.

View on HN

That's why I have a separate VLAN and wifi AP for devices I don't trust. And where possible, I use them over LAN only and block their access to the internet on the firewall. That's also why I like zigbee devices and why I am not very happy about Matter and "IP everywhere".

I'd like to do this but I need some more hardware. I'm thinking to buy a Mikrotik hAP Ax3 Router WiFi 6 or a more expensive Turris Omnia or MOX... The standard home routers doesn't have those features!

For IOT AP I use an old olinuxino with MT7612U 2.4G wifi dongle running Arch Linux ARM as most of my wifi iot devices run on 2.4Ghz wifi anyway.

Then I have a normal wifi in a ASUS PRIME N100I-D D4 x86 low power mobo which I also use as a media box. It has a Mediatek mt7916 wifi 6e-capable (but running wifi 6 currently anyway) M.2 card by AsiaRF in a short cable extender. I took a long time to find a well-supported wifi card.

Then I have a third box which is also a router and has normal 5GHz AP. It also hosts a radius daemon used by all APs which assigns MAC addresses to VLANs, optionally forces them to their unique passphrases. All boxes are connected by LAN cables.

It works perfectly with no issues but it took gradual smaller improvements over many days until I ended up with this setup. It would also be possible to cram everything into a single box if the area to be covered isn't very large.

I'd love to have a robot vacuum but all I checked last time had wifi connectivity and advanced sensors to build accurate map of our home uploaded to an app of my phone with who knows what capabilities. Some even had camera. All they missed some mic to listen in on us, however since some are connected to Alexa that is a wish fulfilled for many.

- Alexa, wipe up that spill in the bedroom.

- Sorry, that requires deep clean, but you had some credit left on your second credit card so I ordeered a deep clening service for Tuesday when you are away.

Some of these vacuums will work without the Wi-Fi. You will have to do without automatic features, for example you have to push the button every time to get it to start, but if you just want it to do the whole area it will run and return to base. It's enough for my area

Your robot vacuum is basically a mobile camera all your neighbors can access

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-11/robot-vacuum-yells-ra...

FYI there is https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo which acts as a replacement of the cloud service. I'd you buy one of the supported devices you root it to point to the Valetudo server (which you run yourselves). You can then put the robot on its own WiFi without Internet access if you want to be even more secure.

Thanks for the tip.

But I am just a user and this is just a vacuum. I rather focus on other than jumping hoops for the products of the indecent manufactureres. While saving a lot of money as bonus. I think I will cope without it.

no need to root it if you have a decent "router" stack. fortigates can re-route even hard-coded IPs to internal services ;-)

i am sure others can too, i just know we had to use the fortigate to fix a hard-coded IP that was breaking something. i think it was a fog device, even.

Do you know if this works with any vacuums? I would assume they used https and would notice that man-in-the-middle attack.

I am not an expert network engineer so i asked the one that manages the fortigate:

> it'll work for whatever ports or application you want since it's a layer 7 firewall

how many of these end up being used for dirty purposes rather than cleaning purposes. not just accidental bathroom pix, but blatant porn.

Which indoor garden? Was thinking about some but want to make sure to avoid this company

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43139381

Gardyn

which brand and model?

I have a Gardyn 3.0 and 4.0.

They run Raspberry Pi OS with some custom code.

They have live access to the cameras.

Were you able to disable their remote access software once you were poking around the raspberry pi?

I could've uninstalled the package, but I moved it all to a separate VLAN until the warranty is over.

I'm debating writing a custom firmware, the GPIO pins are documented somewhere.

  * Run pump. 
  * Turn lights on / off / %. 
  * Measure water in tank. 
  * And then they have a moisture / temperature which they use for their 'AI' / heuristics on whether to water more or less. You don't need that. You just water more often. The point of hydroponics is that the roots sit in water. 
  * Occasional photo (via USB).

I'm trying to find a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with the GPIO pins soldered on the 'other side', as that is how the Gardyn is setup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com