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Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

hackernoon.com

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Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#61

Post by metafex »

StavrosK wrote: post #52
zaroth wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees. If the company sets out to create an open platform and has a business model which works in that world, that is a beautiful thing. Is that the case here and are we seeing a virtuous cycle, are features contributed back to…

Xiaomi is, in general, quite good about opening its products up. The YeeLight bulbs, for example, have a nice open API.

Yeelight is just a startup marketing under the Xiaomi brand and is promoted by them, it's not technically Xiaomi. Same as with other branches of products (e.g. the vacuum robots).

It also happens that Xiaomi later releases products which actually compete with their partners (in this case yeelight and their bedside lamps). Also the whole Yi Camera brand. First marketed with the help of Xiaomi and now a competitor to the Mijia brand (Xiaomis own brand).

(Citations and more insight needed, that was just from memory).

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#62

Post by thinkling »

lozaning wrote: post #9
freehunter wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Wyze cam that I installed OpenIPC on. Very simple process if you’ve ever flashed a firmware before. OpenIPC lets you turn off the cloud stuff and I have mine pushing video over my local network to MotionEye on a Raspberry Pi. The Wyze has IR night vision but the IR can’t see through windows at night so be aware of that. It was like $25 on Amazon, pretty good deal I think.

I've got the same thing going at home, tough to beat ~7 of these cameras flashed with OpenIPC for the cost of a single drop cam. Got the rtsp stream connected up to smartthings and blue iris and have had zero trouble with them. They're only $20 if you order from wyze.com

FWIW, I think you meant wyzecam.com. (Wyze.com redirects to Wyzestore.com which is down.)

EDIT: currently 2-3 weeks backordered on wyzecam.com and out of stock on Amazon.

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#63

Post by epicide »

TheForumTroll wrote: post #28
epicide wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to sound (too) snarky, but the fact that there is an article on hacking a camera to do that kinda tells you that a boxed solution to do mostly the same things doesn't exist :)

Lots exist, just not cheap :)

Yep, I should've been more explicit, but I was counting "be cheap" as part of "mostly the same things".

Recently bought a Nest camera since it seemed like a DIY approach was going to be harder than I thought. Might end up returning it if I can get this to work how I want.

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#64

Post by JohnKacz »

hashgowda wrote: post #54

I want to buy bunch of them and setup a grid in small farm. My challenges are * how do I connect to wifi router which is located in the farm house, because some will be very far from the router. * Also another challenge is how to charge the cameras? Has anybody worked on above issues ?

I'm planning on getting a few Xenon from Particle to do something similar.

https://www.particle.io/mesh

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#65

Post by jimmies »

StavrosK wrote: post #43

There's a virtuous cycle thing going on here: Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs (Xiaomi has a good track record here), people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product, other people buy that product because it's much more advanced than competitors (because of all the ext…

>Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs, people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product,...

I maintain a list of such things. It's amazing when I researched, there is not a central place that does it.

https://github.com/htruong/hackable-consumer-hardware

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#66

Post by allan_s »

atupis wrote: post #25

Any cool use cases?

at weenect we're working on gps tracker for dogs and cat, we have a g-sensor that put the system in sleep when the tracker stop moving and wake it up after a certain threshold. but we need to find some good "threshold" that typically won't wake it up when the dog or the cat sleep and move a little, we have some good values but we still some moves on our tests animals (i.e the co-founders dogs and cat) during the night.

We would like to know if it's due do an actual "the cat wake up to go eat/play/whatever" or it's just "the cat is scratching itself"

so with that camera we could image the camera always recording a stream (or by chunk) and when a move over the threshold is detected, it call something on the camera it copy somewhere else the last N minutes so we can analyze it without staying up all nigh :)

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#67

Post by StavrosK »

jimmies wrote: post #65
StavrosK wrote: post #43

There's a virtuous cycle thing going on here: Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs (Xiaomi has a good track record here), people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product, other people buy that product because it's much more advanced than competitors (because of all the ext…

>Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs, people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product,... I maintain a list of such things. It's amazing when I researched, there is not a central place that does it. https://github.com/htruong/hackable-consumer-hardware

Very nice, starred! You might want to add the ESP32 MCU as well.

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#68

Post by jimmies »

StavrosK wrote: post #67
jimmies wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs, people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product,... I maintain a list of such things. It's amazing when I researched, there is not a central place that does it. https://github.com/htruong/hackable-consumer-hardware

Very nice, starred! You might want to add the ESP32 MCU as well.

I actually have it on the list, but it was lower on the list because I thought it was just not as spectacular of a hack ("unintentional") as ESP8266 was. When they created the ESP32, they knew their audience :)

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#69

Post by Fnoord »

jimmies wrote: post #65
StavrosK wrote: post #43

There's a virtuous cycle thing going on here: Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs (Xiaomi has a good track record here), people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product, other people buy that product because it's much more advanced than competitors (because of all the ext…

>Someone releases a product with hackable/open specs, people are overjoyed because you can't easily get good hardware for cheap and build a bunch of software around it, thus (usually greatly) extending the capabilities of the product,... I maintain a list of such things. It's amazing when I researched, there is not a central place that does it. https://github.com/htruong/hackable-consumer-hardware

iRiver H3{2,4}0 was one of the earlier devices with a 2,5" HDD able to run Rockbox. Even with stock firmware, it supported OGG Vorbis. It sports a NXP ColdFire (previously owned by Motorola/Freescale).

I can recommend the FP2, if you can afford it, since its a tad expensive. Esp for the out of date hardware. But it is unfortunately not all open firmware. Then again, is there any 4G phone out there with open firmware? The FP3 should be out within a year. We gotta see what it'll have in store.

Anyway, nice list. Maybe mention the open source router firmware such as OpenWrt (EDIT: oh, you did. Well, LEDE merged w/them recently). PC-Engines APU(2) [1] also supports Coreboot. There's also a plethora of Raspberry Pi clones out there, many of which run AllWinner which is a PITA.

[1] http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

Re: Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth

#70

Post by Nexxxeh »

atupis wrote: post #25

Any cool use cases?

In the UK, that makes it cheaper than the Philips Hue PIR-based motion sensor, which is crazy. And while non-Zigbee, you could easily integrate it into an existing Hue setup.

It enables you to add more intelligence to your home automation because not only can it detect motion, if you offload the processing, it can enable object recognition.

So your cat doesn't trigger it. Or triggers a different action.

Because you can control the IR leds and filtering, you can mount it in a dome for ultra-cheap external pan and tilt with an external IR illuminator.

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