Thingino: Open-Source Firmware for IP Cameras | Hacker News Reader

Thingino: Open-Source Firmware for IP Cameras

thingino.com

278 pointszakki49 comments

The prior OpenIPC thread from earlier today is literally 75% about thingino:

OpenIPC: Open IP Camera Firmware — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44758463 — Aug 2025 (106 comments)

The cheapest camera that you can install this onto, is Cinnado D1, which retails at under $14.99 USD FBA on Amazon Prime in the US:

https://github.com/wltechblog/thingino-installers/tree/main/...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP — ≤ $14.99 FBA for Cinnado D1, #3 best-seller in "Dome Surveillance Cameras"

Some older Wansview, TP-Link, Wyze and Imou are also supported.

Part of the reason these cams are sold so cheap, and are directly imported into the US by the brand owners, is because they're making all of their money from the subscriptions. It's also the reason why buying a single camera is actually cheaper than buying a pack.

That does seem to be Ingenic SoC based (which is what Thingino supports).

One neat thing about openipc is that it supports a huge range of SoC. Example link. https://openipc.org/cameras/vendors/hisilicon

I think the biggest difference I could see is that OpenIPC targets Europe as its main market, whereas thingino is US/Canada and is easier to get started with.

Honestly, I couldn't find a single Amazon ASIN for anything listed on OpenIPC.

It's not much help for them to support more devices if none of those are being imported into the US.

Compare to thingino, which has support for Wyze, Eufy, Wansview, Cinnado, Imou, TP-Link and lots of other brands which are officially imported into the US and are best-sellers in their respective categories on Amazon, with the free Fulfilled-by-Amazon shipping.

OpenIPC notably doesn't list products & things you can buy.

Their "supported hardware" is what chipsets they support! It's up to you to go "do the research" or whatever to find out what cameras that might be!

I've bounced hard off OpenIPC in the past for this reason. That said I think the hikvision I bought a couple years ago is supported.

I've looked at the OpenIPC sponsors. It looks like there's a huge market in Eastern Europe to install a camera at the entrance to your apartment building, and then charge your neighbours for camera access as a value-added service, e.g., a shared intercom. Also, to keep an eye on the shared courtyard (dvor24). Pretty ingenious, if you ask me!

OpenIPC lists SoCs, and it lists SoCs used by the Wyze cameras. I just looked mine up.

Since Thingino targets retail devices at the top level rather than components, when you install our firmware you get an image made specifically for your device. We can give you easier installation methods than using a flash programming in many cases, and once your camera is flashed, all of its functions work out of the box.

Also, by focusing on the Ingenic platform, you can be assured that your camera will actually work once installed. That was not my experience with OpenIPC.

The cheapest supported camera, aside from a given you as a gift, is Jooan A2R from Temu. It is like $3 per piece, brand new. It is a nice little pan/tilt model with a low-end 720p sensor. But it is fast, nice looking, snappy and dirt cheap.

I'm seeing $9.66 on Temu. The description update on this video explains that it's due to tariffs (is it cheaper outside the US?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfeA8wOEe34

The price fluctuates for sure. I bought 9 of these cams and my average price was right at $4... but now I'm seeing them closer to $10 and i can't recommend them over the Cinnado which you can often get for $10.

I just installed this on my Wyse cam 2 after using the defang hacks for years. This works all the same but it is much better. Having working night vision where it isn't just randomly enabling the IR filter is great.

Upgrade from dafang was easy if you follow the guide on the github wiki. Getting RTSP working was strange as it wouldn't work over IP but did over local DNS entry, but that's the only issue I've found so far.

Oh nice. I have one of those somewhere in a box, as the 'Dafang hacks' was flaky to me. I should try it!

Fascinating comparison of the main page here versus the OpenIPC camera firmware also on the front page.

First thing I want to know is "do I have this hardware".

These guys do it right.

It's still a pretty hard question to answer, given how specific model numbers are sometimes missing on sales listings, and silent revisions to hardware.

in most cases you can tell at a glance. We have run into vendors changing their internals without any way of telling other than opening the cam up. Last year mos vendors started moving their cameras from the T31 processor to the newer (cheaper) T23, without changing model names. I've bought at least one cam where one user got an Ingenic chip and I got some random ARM chip.. and a few cases where they have a few wifi chip options and its a coin toss which one you get. When possible I try to account for this in my installers, so that the user doesn't need to deal with it themselves, but other times its unavoidable.

What does the firmware do, practically? Can I use the firmware on my Wyze cameras as a drop-in replacement? Will the cameras still talk to the Wyze app?

I guess my question is: from a practical viewpoint, what do I get with this firmware (other than that it is open and all that, which I totally appreciate).

Thingino is a replacement of the stock firmware. But you obviously lose the ability to use vendor's cloud. Because if you still want to use the subscription service, why would you need to replace the stock firmware?

A typical camera has a certain functionality: remote monitoring, alerting on events, etc.

How would I, a random user, go about getting this functionality with Thingino?

https://frigate.video

> The Ingenic Zeratul, Atlas, and Tassadar platforms are a series of System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions designed primarily for battery-powered IoT cameras and smart home devices.

Seems like someone at Ingenic is a StarCraft fan!

https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki/Zeratul-...

Open-source Firmware for Ingenic SoC IP Cameras. Unlike OpenIPC, the encoder, recorder and streamer in thingino are open source.

These projects are very cool, especially if you're stuck with a crappy "app only" camera. But lack of even rudimentary AI motion detection and alerting is a bit of a deal breaker.

My guess is that these processors are so underpowered that they're incapable of doing anywhere close to the true AI. So, what'd you'd do, is a regular motion detection (this thing does support that, right?), and then apply the AI at the processing layer on the NAS.

The Ingenic processors actually have some AI capability, but our firmware is just at the early stages of trying to incorporate it. You're still better off using Frigate or similar!

Motion detection works fine of course.

By my understanding that isn't usually the job of the camera itself, they don't have the processing power to do it at a reasonable speed, so I wouldn't expect this firmware to offer it.

That sort of task is usually done by the software that reads from the cameras, be that something local like https://frigate.video/ or the cloud-based ML of the manufacturer of your camera.

We have basic motion detection and alerting in Thingino. You can send alerts (with stills or video clips) to email, telegram, and several other targets.

Here's a good YouTube overview from the developer

https://youtu.be/QQV6vjzhylg

This looks like a great project!

That's my video. I'm indeed one of the developers but my contributions are mostly around adding new devices, creating installers when possible, and doing most of the Youtube content!

I installed this on a kitty cam. It was very easy, discord was a fun experience. Great software, and great group. Do not underestimate how useful it is to have firmware for your specific device - I bought my cam based on thingino support, and I would do exactly the same again. You need to be ready to tinker since at least my cams were fiddly. But with that expectation, enjoy!

This looks really nice, but I can’t see HomeKit support listed. I had a few ESP32 cameras that mostly worked, so it can be done…

Come to our Discord for support, we have people using Thingino with HomeKit.

Thanks for the invite, but I find Discord appalling to use. Do you have a normal web forum I can search?

I'm so happy this was posted as I had no idea this exists. I had an old chinese cam, completely out of order with a very loud Chinese voice speaking (no, shouting) when attempting to turn it on. It now works beautifully with Thingio! Thank you!

This is really great and an underrated project. I speculate that this idea will trigger other innovations in this field as it brings developers access. As the surveillance state expands its reach, projects like this deserve recognition.

Cool! I hope this supports my Yi cameras someday. They added advertising to their app so now every time I gotta check my cams I first need to dismiss ads. That's a fabulous way to piss off customers.

I just bricked a wyze2 camera. I was excited to finally be able to use the units again. Followed the process but unfortunately, the camera dead.

You cannot brick these that easily. Come to the support channel on Discord and we'll teach you how to revive it.

Anyone has recommendations for open source self host video recorder and processor?

https://frigate.video/

Frigate has been ok for me when paired with a gpu or tpu for to speed up the object recognition features. It's the closest I've found to the usual IP camera cloud sold by the IP camera manufacturers.

That said, it's installation method uses containers, which I could do without. Configuring it can feel a bit fiddly depending on the hardware you have, but that's likely to be the case with most NVR systems that support a wide variety of setups.

I'll probably just connect this into home assistant

SentryShot OVR

I used Marius’ Portainer guides for both Frigate[1] and iSpy Agent DVR (not OSS)[2].

I haven’t been able to get Frigate to see the garden eufy cam yet but iSpy worked right away with the same credentials.

I’ll choose my next cameras based on the Thingino supported list. Thank you to everyone working on this project!

[1] https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-frigate-on-your-syn...

[2] https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-ispy-on-your-synolo...

thingino works pretty well (why? it's linux!)

I should know, I help make it!

Combine thingino, friagte and go2rtc, with home assistant, and you can have a sweet setup with recording, and low latency playback. The family loves it.

I wish something existed for the Amazon Cloudcams I still have around …

This isn't related to Thingino specifically, but I just started trying to find an outdoor camera to watch nightlife, and I have to say, it's been a painful experience. Literally all I want is to get a notification on my phone when an animal moves around in my large yard, and watch a recording of it on my phone soon after. And that, apparently, is very difficult.

The first problem I ran into what "what camera do I buy???" First I looked at trail cams, because those are made for this, right? Except, no, they almost all require a SIM card data plan. There are a few with wifi but they are all "mini hotspots", meaning you have to disconnect from your own wifi to connect to them, and maybe get nofications, and maybe you can stream live video, if they aren't buggy, and if the range reaches. So trail cams are out (and honestly that's fine because there's too many of them to look through as well)

So then I start looking at outdoor "security" cameras that can connect to my wifi, have some kind of app, motion detection, notifications, etc. Now I want to place this at the back of my yard where the animals come in, and there's no power there, so I think battery powered, right?

I spend 2 days doing research to finally buy a Reolink... only to find out 1) everyone says don't get Reolink (honestly it's not that bad), and 2) the motion detection is almost unusable, because all battery cameras only use a PIR sensor (to save battery), and their PIR sensors are not designed like the better trail-cam PIR sensors, so a wide-angle, long-range area won't detect motion (even if you can see the motion in live view). So your best bet for actually detecting motion is a plugged-in IP camera with an RTSP/ONVIF stream and some software to do pixel diffing (and then the "AI" (lol) feature of cropping away false-detection areas and shapes).

So now I'm packaging up the Reolink to return it, and looking at what cameras are cheap and have built-in pixel detection (if possible) or streaming to an NVR (which of course is another expense and thing for me to figure out how to build or buy). But there's still hundreds of different models of all kinds and price points to sift through. And of course there'll be the separate project of "how do I power the thing" (because I'd rather not spend even more on an outdoor-buried-compatible ethernet cable + POE adapter, plus the labor of digging below the frost line for hundreds of feet; but if I don't, i'll need to jury-rig up a spare battery and solar panel, and possibly wifi adapter if the camera doesn't have wifi).

It would be great if there were just a web page that asked me what I was trying to do and told me "buy this." The funny thing is, I've been using ChatGPT throughout this entire process and it failed to inform me of al this at the beginning, so clearly there's more tailored guides needed for people to pick the right thing.

> The funny thing is, I've been using ChatGPT throughout this entire process and it failed to inform me of al this at the beginning, so clearly there's more tailored guides needed for people to pick the right thing.

So, you want someone to write a guide, but you admit you're not gonna read it or click on any affiliate links, because you'll just get that info from ChatGPT?

I think this is a problem we're gonna have with the AI age.

If the only consumer of information, is AI, who will be watching the ads and clicking the links to support all the content production?

The domination of ads on the internet, as I remember it, came about around the time Google exploded in popularity. At the time there were still free services paid for by ad-banners, but it was to pay for services, not content.

Whether it's mindless "recipe blogs", the YouTube spam of reviewers being paid to lie about products, or the instagram Influencers (the fact that people call them that un-ironically is insane), I welcome the death of content. The "normal" web will still be here when it all goes away.

did you try frigate for the motion detection ?

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