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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

#71

Post by photojosh »

leggomylibro wrote: post #59
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…

On the other hand, they also open themselves to people just making their own versions of the product for much less. If you choose them for their hackability, your core processors will probably have minimal development boards available for less than $2.50 each if you're using anything less powerful than a Cortex-M4 ARM core. And now you have a huge part of your value proposition - the easy-to-use and user-configurable…

> On the other hand, they also open themselves to people just making their own versions of the product for much less.

There is a large exception for anything with a camera. Everything to do with the chipsets or sensors is under NDA and inaccessible unless you want to produce thousands of devices. I would love to be able to play with (say) a half-decent 2 year old camera chipset+sensor, which would apparently cost just a few $, but it's a no go.

For instance, the Raspberry Pi camera is entirely handled by closed-source blobs on the CPU and GPU. The best you can do is get cheap USB webcams from China for $20-30, but they're power hungry and you can't run them from a microcontroller.

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

#72

Post by scottlamb »

zaroth wrote: post #51
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…

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…

> 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.

A couple other reasons:

* They want to sell the same product at different prices in different regions.

* They're concerned about copycat hardware vendors.

Hikvision (and I think Dahua) seems to want to prevent people from modifying their firmware; as far as I can tell it's for these reasons. I really wish they would just open it up. I'd love to put open source firmware on a decent outdoor IP camera. The vendors' own firmware is pretty lacking. It's untrustworthy (proprietary software from a Chinese company; how sure are you it doesn't have backdoors?), written insecurely (probably out of negligence rather than intent but again who knows), buggy in general, has mediocre motion detection (not sure I could do better on their hardware but I'd love to try), and has mediocre H.264 encoding (likewise).

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

#73

Post by jimmies »

Fnoord wrote: post #69
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

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?…

Thanks, I will remember to add to the list :)

FP2 is a respectable piece of hardware, by the way. I just never had it because I am too poor.

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

#74

Post by nextlevelwizard »

tjoff wrote: post #57
pdelbarba wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with making hackable products?

It has to do with the intent and why the virtuous cycle isn't always so benign. We should really value companies that actually make products you can take control over, rather than blindly relying on lack of security to being able to do what we want. Intent is quite important. It also sends a strange message when lack of security is seen as something good. Now I don't have any criticism/knowledge about this product or…

I don't get how this can result into vendor lock in. Just don't buy the stuff that has it if you were first drawn in by "open" hackable hardware.

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

#75

Post by ritanelson »

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

#76

Post by StavrosK »

ausjke wrote: post #33
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.

First time heard about openipc, checked its github, it is still just binary format though, thought 'open' means some source code...

Is it? I see the whole file system layout on Github, or do you mean the firmware blob?

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

#77

Post by Pearljamfan »

freehunter wrote: post #5
diggan wrote: post #4

Speaking about cheap cameras. I'm planning to setup some cameras at home. Anyone have any recommendations for devices that are cheap, can see moderately good in the dark, can be connected to a raspberry and doesn't force you to connect to some cloud service?

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.

What about wyze cam version 2? Will this work?
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