Turning a Decommissioned iPhone into a UniFi Protect Camera | Hacker News Reader

Turning a Decommissioned iPhone into a UniFi Protect Camera

caseyliss.com

121 pointsingve51 comments

> "At first, I was presented with an endless spinner, as I hadn’t configured things properly. The documentation on Github is enough, but frustratingly, the failure mode I ran into was the video just… not loading. However, I eventually got it nailed down, and now I have a new camera in Protect."

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It is unfortunate that they decided to omit how they fixed the last issue they mentioned. That could've been useful knowledge for others

Honestly, I saw this and was very interested to learn how they actually solved the problem. Cool that OP did it! Bummed that they weren't willing to share how they did it.

I also thought this strange to leave out the exact details and information that people would actually be interested to learn about.

"The documentation on Github is enough, but frustratingly, the failure mode I ran into was the video just… not loading. However, I eventually got it nailed down, and now I have a new camera in Protect."

Are you sure you want to go down this route: "Turn device into IP Camera"? - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ip-camera-lite/id1013455241

Anyway - this is likely the Github mentioned: https://github.com/p10tyr/rtsp-to-onvif

... its a proxy that takes a RTSP stream and makes it look all lovely and ONVIF (ie discoverable). The particular fix that OP mentions will be in that Github repo/wiki/issues but given I don't anything Apple, I can't be arsed to search

I think that Frigate has recently had a proxy or proxy handling recently added. Zoneminder would also work with this approach.

Please, whatever you do, put your cameras on their own VLAN, with no access to the internet. Especially if names like Reolink (int al) are involved. I own quite a few Reos and they live on a VLAN called SEWER!

Might be a case of: tried so many things, no idea what fixed it.

From some research, Unifi Protect doesn’t support live audio or audio playback for third-party cameras. It also lacks support for people and vehicle detections.

I would likely consider using this setup for some inexpensive auxiliary cameras to enhance coverage. I’ve also had the desire to add a cheap remote camera while I’m staying in an Airbnb. However, I wouldn’t use this system for any serious surveillance around the house.

If can support detection events on 3rd party ONVIF cameras, but you have to buy a seperate ubiquiti hardware product to run the detections. Either an AI Port or an AI Key.

You could also use the ZoneMinder (open-source), it supports many video/image streams from cameras and provides detections/alerting

I use scrypted! It's 'open source' but not free. Was just talking about getting detecting in the Unifi Protect NVR (which is pretty nice I admit)

> It also lacks support for people and vehicle detections.

I think they sell hardware to add that to 3rd party cameras. For the low price of 200 :)))) https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/up-ai-port

Of course, it's vendor-locked consumer garbage ;)

Casey, this is the most Casey thing I've ever heard, using an iPhone + some hackery when even cheap Amazon no-name PTZ cameras ($30-40 usually) natively support onvif! I'm happy it worked for you though.

Who the hell is Casey? ;)

The author of the article.

One of the hosts of https://atp.fm

"Hi, this is Casey."

-Casey

If anyone does not listen to ATP, I cannot recommend that show enough. I'll add that you do have to have at least a tolerance for certain of the 3 hosts' assumptions, namely that one should be an Apple user for life. Not that they go easy on Apple, but they seem to be dedicated lifers no matter how bad Apple gets.

I have heard the camera modules get hot and degrade as they weren't created to be always ON in smartphones?

And the answer is as always, it depends. Mostly on the chip & sensor combo and if there is additional heat absorbing mass designed for the SoC.

Disappointed to see no discussion on battery. That's what is keeping me from implementing this. My old iphones are at 2+ years battery life. i.e. at the point where they're at risk of becoming spicy pillows and I'd love to not have a lithium fire in my apartment. In that context spending 50 bucks on amazon for a camera suddenly seems sound

i could be wrong but you should be able to solder/connect the battery contacts to the output of a power supply at the same voltage as the battery you're replacing and just have it plugged into the wall or a UPS, but not sure if the battery manager would still think the battery is being spent and freak out after getting to 0%

I've not personally tried it, but there have been people who have had success removing their iPhone batteries and getting old devices to power via Lightning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/androidafterlife/comments/zpya9p/i_...

oh that's fun. I had assumed ifruits would just decide nope if they can't see the battery

edit: that's a rather old v6 in link...think they started with their authenticating components after that

> 2+ years battery life

Is this considered old? I own countless devices with batteries older than this.

Not an expert on this but my understanding is that at 2+ risk starts to increase, especially that have seen high use and fast charging.

My layman understand is that dendrites accumulate over time so risk is incremental over use...and for phones use and time is basically same thing. Low use items I'd totally run for many more years.

No. We have a couple hundred phones at work that are 5-9 years old. Does failure rate increase with time? Of course. Until you hit 5 years, the phone is perfectly fine.

I think it's charge/discharge cycles more than time that gets to batteries. I've heard that a decent rule of thumb for LiPo batteries is that they'll drop to around 80% of "new capacity" in around 1000 cycles. So around 3 years to drop to 80% capacity if they're fully charged/discharged daily, or around 5 years if they're only discharged to 30-40% and topped up daily. If you only charge them once every week or month (like my Kindle), the battery will probably still be fine after 20 years. And on the other hand if you're the sort of person who talks on your ophoine for several hours a day (like my boss) or streams YouTube all day - and need to recharge your phone in the middle of the day, you'r battery could drop below 80% in a yeah and a half.

I'm currently using an iPhone 13 from late 2021, so almost 4 years old. It's showing 79% Maximum Capacity in Battery Health, and I only occasionally use more then 75% of battery over a days use.

I still have the iPhone XR I upgraded from, so a 7 year old 2018 phone, that still holds a whole day's charge too (but doesn't get much use, and doesn't have a SIM in it right now so I'd guess it's powered down the cellular radios?)

I have an iPod Touch from a bit before Covid, so 6 years old from 2019-ish - it stopped getting daily use when Covid and WFH hit, so it's battery is old, but still in reasonable condition. (Pity newer iOS won't run on it...)

Depends on how you use it, but with intensive use like 2+ charge cycles a day 7 days a week, and long times connected to charger makes 2+ years quite old.

Can confirm that sticking an old iPhone, say, connected to power in your garage to serve as a kiosk device 24/7 will 100% result in the battery swelling up. I had it happen. Now, in my case it didn't cause any harm and I was even able to replace that 5S's battery. But tbh I would not trust an Apple device in a permanently-powered situation for this reason.

Especially since Apple, in their benevolence, software-restricts the technology of the "only charge to 80%" option to only their newest devices (14 series and up, only) so anything older than that will be torturing its battery if left on a charger long-term.

Apple itself supports using an old iPhone as a camera for Apple TV Facetime and karaoke use, so while this is a risk, it doesn't seem to be something the company is concerned about.

https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/use-your-iphone-or-ipad-a...

I'm sure whoever pitched this 'dedicated' feature in Cupertino had to make sure to state that customers would purchase a new iPhone for this role rather than... shudder reuse an old device. As we all know, Apple has a deep and abiding desire that the vast majority of used iPhones be shredded[1].

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/94386/the-truth-about-apples-fre...

A long time ago, I used to work at a place that decided to stick iPads onto meeting room doorways to display who had the room booked (because people are the worst). These'd last 7 or 8 months before the battery puffed up enough to be noticed, or in a few cases to crack the screens. I grabbed a few power point timer switches, and set them to only over up the charger for a hour a day. Never had another battery puffing failure - at last not in the next 2 or 3 years before I left. (As the iPads got old, charging for 1 hour per day wasn't always enough to keep them running 24x7, but I'd set them to start charging at 6am so worst case was someone needed to power up the iPad and start the room booking webapp on it in the morning. If a particular iPad got its battery into a state where that was happening regularly, we just adjusted the power point timer to charge twice a day, morning and evening.)

This is a product category ("battery health protection device"): https://chargie.org | https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chargie&sort=byDate&type=comme...

Any list of cool uses for decommissioned iPhones?

I would be actually quite interested in using my 6S as a tv box / HDMI dongle for streaming and emulation.

Wondering if there is any way to run a webserver on old iphone?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022640

Or, even older! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473487 (2009)

i think you pasted the wrong link for the first one, it links to the parent comment.

UniFi people are like the vegans of tech

It is really good though. Network has come a long way, and really is powerful, intuitive, and can support most advanced use cases. Protect is awesome, no cloud storage tomfoolery. AI features like license plate and facial recognition, and partner it with access and you can do some awesome integrations such as automatically open up your front gate, door, etc based on your car or face.

Have they had a third party audit since a disgruntled employee did whatever they did? They had an insider threat situation a couple years back I think. I didn’t follow the story closely at the time, but I’ve supported end users and installs for Ubiquiti/Unifi stuff, and since that happened, I haven’t really been sure how much I should trust them.

More info here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquiti#2021_alleged_data_bre...

Sorry?

I run an IT company and a lot of my customers have Unifi APs (we sold them). Our in house controller has a lot of sites on it and it must be a good 10 years old now. Its certainly gone through at least three Ubuntu LTSs.

I eat vegans for lunch.

The joke for those who missed it:

"How do you know somebody loves Unifi?"

"Don't worry they'll tell you"

Disclaimer: I do like unifi.

No this is false. Vegans have a point. UniFi enthusiasts are damaged without any underlying technical or moral reasoning.

UBNT has this weird market slice where their kit falls into being either dogshit with long term support or almost great with terrible support.

Seeing the same people complaining that they have to move to a new portal every few years, deploying customer facing Unifi OLTs gives me this incredible belly laugh.

Show me an alternative, then. Requirements are:

* flawless wi-fi

* tiny managed PoE switches

* networking UI that lets you document things (name ports and devices, etc)

* security cameras

* storage/playback for security video

* quick setup

* zero fiddling required

All this needs to be integrated and must not require fussing around too much, I currently have three networks/setups and my life is too short for manually messing around with infrastructure.

I guess you would classify me as a "damaged unifi enthusiast", while I'm just practical: this stuff works for me (has worked for the last several years). I'm open to other solutions, but they need to be more than just "possible" and have more advantages than "not being unifi".

As someone who might move into a house soon and wants wifi + a few cameras with on prem AI, what are the alternatives? Needs to be easy to setup.

Why are UniFi enthusiasts without moral reasoning?

Have you taken a look at https://www.cctvcamerapros.com/ ?

It will cost a little more than the cheap ones on Amazon, but you get fully locally-hosted setup and their camera controller is running linux. You can swap in your own hard-drive for storing recordings. No subscriptions, and setup is pretty easy. Their technical support is top-notch - it's a small company and their engineers know the equipment well. No relationship, but I a customer.

There’s very little alternative if you want a networking ecosystem plus owning your data.

I think it’s sneering at people who have something doing some pieces automatically for you, when the OP cobbled it together themselves uphill both ways.

UI is a great ecosystem for home and small businesses.

I've been slowly accumulating Unifi gear and I'm happy with it, though my experience is mixed - the prices are relatively good for a unified ecosystem, IMO.

OTOH I've had two pieces of equipment die: an outdoor camera that shorted PoE pins because it really wasn't an outdoor camera, and the original doorbell that died after about three years of use (cause of death unknown, but I suspect a heavy rainstorm). Technically I had a third 48-port, 1st gen EdgeRouter Pro (750W model) that I saved from e-waste that died, but that already had quite a few years under its belt.

I still lean towards liking them. I have a set of 5 in-wall APs that have been functioning for 5? 6? years straight and still get updates and work with the unifi console. My Dream Machine Pro works pretty well for its purpose. I don't like that it doesn't offer more PoE+2.5G port options, and that only two ports are true PoE++, but from an effort perspective it's been so nice to manage.

All this being said, I think that their strength is in APs that are a good balance of tech + cost, and cameras which lean slightly more expensive but are trivially easy to manage locally and remotely. Going forward I'd probably skip unifi cameras and try to integrate OTS ONVIF cameras which will be a better value.

I'd avoid any of the large switching gear. I don't think that stuff is well-priced, and it lags a bit behind what you can find from Mikrotik and other manufacturers. It's not that important to have that stuff included in your dashboards, IMO.

The only bit of Ubiquiti gear I can tolerate is the many years out-of-date EdgeRouter 8 Pro, and only because OpenWrt supports it, and it runs dual-core octeon (2 GB DDR3 which is huge for a router) with decent hardware flow offloading.

This surprised a few people, but the latest official edgerouter pro firmware is 3.0.0 released July 28, 2025.

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