wltechblog

We have a bunch of ptz outdoor units supported by Thingino. Check out thingino.com for the full list of supported devices!

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.

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.

Thingino has ssh. There are product docs available with the differences between chips, but in a nutshell X series have 128MB and others have 64, except for a newcomer (T23DL) that only has 32! For normal usage, 64MB is enough. The 32MB chip works well enough but you'll need to have an SD card inserted to do online firmware updates which otherwise isn't necessary.

If you don't see a specific device on our site, we either haven't seen one yet or we know it's not compatible. We rely on users to find new devices in the wild that we can port to, if you see an Ingenic chip in a cam not on the site let us know!

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.

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!

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.

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.

These processors range between 32 and 128 megabytes of ram, and a chunk of that is reserved at bootup for the hardware feature blocks.

We have a couple devices that support 5ghz, but I don't think any of them are on my favorites list. I picked up a Wansview G6 which is a light bulb format cam, my least favorite, but it was our first dual band device. More to follow!

2-way audio works via ONVIF with clients as long as they support rtsp backchannel!

PTZ works great although none of these devices actually HAVE a zoom apability.

Indeed we don't have that 4k yet but we've got a lot of 3k options and 4k coming soon. We're 100 transparent about which devices we support, the full list including photos and specs is on our homepage, there's not much room for confusion there.

wyze doorbell v1 is very cheap refurb on ebay and has an actual 4 megapixel selsor they run at 1080p for no particular reason in their firmware. It's 4 megapixel when you run Thingino!

You might have better luck with the Thingino project, we target specific devices.

POE hasn't really made it to the commodity level you'll find on Amazon. There are some Vanhua models available on Aliexpress.. we also have some users successfully using various POE to USB adapters. I don't use one myself so i can't personally vouch for one... note that not all cams have data available on their USB ports, if you have questions about a specific choice, come visit us on Discord!

Thingino doesn't support cams with ARM processors, we only support the chips made by Ingenic (which are a MIPS superset they call Xburst). We have a number of 4 megapixel (not 4k) devices we support, and are in the process of adding support for the next generation of Ingenic chips (Xburst2) which will bring up support for 8 megapixel (4k) devices.

We're also focused mostly on the less expensive models, because they're obviously within reach for a lot more folks but also they're almost always subsidized by the expectation that a discounted purchase price is made up for by the vendor's cloud subscription. You can get a LOT of great camera models for a low price.

I will say that there is a story about Hikvision that would likely steer most folks away from their brand.. it's bad enough that Google won't index it... With that said, I don't believe anyone should be trusting any third party with their video data in the first place...

Our firmware is open source, if you think you can provide an upsell on pre-installed cams, go for it!

Thingino is a full replacement firmware for Ingenic-based ip cameras. While we have some overlap with OpenIPC it's fair to say that our missions are quite different. I don't consider us competing projects, they even use some of our code (and possibly vice-versa) in their firmware.

The 5MP version is not yet supported! it's identical to the Cinnado D1 5MP, and in addition to the better sensor (and dual band wifi!) they use the next generation Ingenic processors. Work in progress!

yep I've got a video on the installation on my channel too!

There are people using Thingino to provide security camera services. Just selling the cam pre-flashed probably isn't a great plan as I go out of my way to make it as easy as possible for people to flash our firmware themselves!

Generally the cheapest fro Amazom is by Cinnado. I have a video on installing it my channel as well. I've bought this model for as low as $9.50 shipped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phqR49t75Ak

The Q5 is on our supported list. I have a user who YOLOd and tried the Cinnado D1 (t23) installer and claimed success. Cinnado and Wasnview (and galayou and a few others!) are owned by the same company so a lot of things are shared.

Most of the image/video related stuff is done in the hardware, as well as a bunch of other functionality that would be hard to do on a 1 watt cpu. Check out the block diagram of the T31 processor: https://en.ingenic.com.cn/products-detail/id-21.html

Our streamer (prudynt-t) communicates with those blocks to handle settings, overlays, etc and receives the pre-processed image/video/audio data, packages it up for rtsp//mjpeg/etc, and handles client connections, motion sending, day/night vision, etc.

This is the status quo for ip cameras regardless of vendor!

The ING in Thingino stands for Ingenic. The Ingenic chips are MIPS, all the other cams are ARM. Focusing on these chips allows us to produce a firmware that actually works (not my experience with openipc) and is already configured for a specific product so you don't have to spend hours figuring out specifics for your camera to enable the hardware features!

I'm generally the guy making "easy installers" for Thingino cams. The default way to install on a cam is to use a flash programmer, some devices you can use a uart adapter.. I try to find opportunities in the factory firmware that allow you to flash using just a SD card when possible, and publish walkthrough videos on my channel. Some other devices you can flash with a flash glitch trick at boot, which I have several devices documented for that method as well. I'm a huge proponent of privacy and security being available to everyone and not just the technically minded user, and being able to get a commodity priced camera to faithfully serve a non-technical user is my goal!

More info is at my installers repo https://github.com/wltechblog/thingino-installers or my YT channel (WLTechBlog)