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Hacking a $30 IoT camera to do more than it’s worth
- salki04 9y agoI wonder how he got the root password. I see he found it but not a description of how. Does anyone know how can this be done?
- ultratrash 9y agoThe trick for most device is to get a serial console and set uboot "flashargs" or using the init=bin/sh trick, grab the root hash, shove it through hashcat.
- jasonjayr 9y agoYou are exactly correct. https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks/blob/master/hacks/getroot.md https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks/blob/mas...
- diggan 9y agoSpeaking 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?
- freehunter 9y agoI 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.
- diggan 9y agoLooks great and I was started to look into it, but seems it's just within US (and even with that, probably only provide the power adapter for US plugs). I should have been more clear and indicated I live in the magical world of Europe (Spain specifically).
- lozaning 9y agoI'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
- StavrosK 9y agoDoes anyone know of a good Android viewer for RTSP? I'm probably going to proxy it with an HTTP webserver over TLS (if I can do that with RTSP? EDIT: Apparently I can't, I'll have to find a way to add authentication) to add basic auth, so the viewer will need to support that.
- freehunter 9y agoI use TinyCam on an Amazon Fire tablet to view my RTSP stream but only locally. Over the Internet I view the stream from MotionEye on my RPi using their authentication. In that case I can view it in the browser, no app needed.
- StavrosK 9y agoThank you, I didn't know of those apps, I'll try them now.
- dagrha 9y agoVLC is great-- it's what I use for viewing RTSP on my LAN.
- notyourday 9y ago
- nickspacek 9y agoThe linked article is a guide to "hacking" a $30 Xiaomi Dafang IP camera. This camera is an "indoor motorized WiFi camera capable of 1080P resolution and decent night-vision, its price is cheap". If you bought one, all the "hacking" required is inserting a MicroSD card with a custom firmware on it and pressing and holding the camera's reset button to flash the custom firmware. From then on, the camera has the ability to boot from your MicroSD which can contain services that allow the camera to stream to local clients, among other things. More detailed instructions in the article.
- diggan 9y agoThanks, I saw said article as I'm commenting in it's thread :) But I wanted to avoid the hacking and just buy something that I don't have to force into doing what I want but rather come in a clean slate.
- epicide 9y agoNot 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 :)
- diggan 9y agoNo worries, my initial comment might have been on the wrong post ("hey, I see you hack cameras but if I don't have time for that, where can I buy one with acceptable out-of-the-box behaviour?") but I felt the subject was a bit related at least, and I don't know any of them so I asked :)
- TheForumTroll 9y agoLots exist, just not cheap :)
- epicide 9y agoYep, 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.
- rb808 9y agoOutdoors - anyone have any suggestion for waterproof ones? Both of these look indoor only.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y agoGlue-gun on the seams and a few desiccant packets inside?
- skykooler 9y agoIf you're planning on connecting directly to a Raspberry Pi, the simplest option is a NoIR Raspberry Pi Camera Module and a few IR LEDs.
- diggan 9y agoThanks! That's probably what I will end up doing, but the price will be much higher than just buying the IP Cameras.
- abawany 9y agoI was able to find some RPi cameras on eBay for about $8 each, though they weren't NoIR. I also found RPi ZeroW for the official price of $10 (from pishop.us) and that combination worked well as an open remote cam for me.
- VectorLock 9y agoI see a lot of products like this on Alibaba that I wish I could put my own firmware on. I've messaged a few of them telling them "I'd buy 1000 of these if I can put my own firmware on them" but haven't gotten any good responses. What I'm aiming for sometimes gets lost in translation, but mostly I think they just don't get the premise I'm presenting to sales people who answer the Alibaba inquiries.
- samfisher83 9y agoA lot of the seller in Alibaba are just buying camera OEM from a factory so they wouldn't be able to get you the software. The factory itself might be just copying the reference design from chip manufacturer and they might not have access to the code or under a NDA. The chip manufacturer does not have an incentive to provide you custom firmware. You aren't their customer.
- tomer_shalev 9y agoThese are exactly the same reasons which prevented mp3 players manufacturers back in the day from opening up their specifications to open source projects, such as Rockbox
- creeble 9y agoYes, it's notoriously difficult to find who actually makes the hardware for these devices! let alone who writes the firmware. Many cameras are much too hard to reverse engineer in order to run your own firmware. Fwiw, I recall that this is exactly how Dropcam started: they reverse-engineered the firmware for (iirc) an Axis net cam, then provided their own.
- StavrosK 9y agoThere'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 extra software), profit for the parent company. Basically, the company gets a bunch of people to do work for free, the product gets improved, the company makes profit, everybody wins.
- tjoff 9y agoYou forgot the part where the company uses that profit and market penetration to stifle competition, lock down the hardware and lock in the users. And boom, current state of affairs.
- pdelbarba 9y agoWhat does this have to do with making hackable products?
- tjoff 9y agoIt 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 xiaomi in general. IP cameras are generally quite overpriced in my uninformed opinion and you still almost always get locked into the cloud. So I really welcome this hack.
- nextlevelwizard 9y agoI 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.
- atupis 9y agoAny cool use cases?
- solarkraft 9y agoAnything involving automated camering.
- allan_s 9y agoat 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 :)
- Nexxxeh 9y agoIn 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.
- cloverich 9y agoThis ecosystem is ripe for software based innovation. There's a lot of great hardware out there but the API's are often closed and the existing software lackluster. After some research I recently purchased a Wifi camera, and am planning on using it to track my 6mo old's sleep habits (using some custom scripts / classification / etc). Guide's like this are great because they help make these things possible. I hope over time as more people publish hacks and cool projects based on them, some of these companies will start to open up their platform / API's. There's so many potentially cool projects that will hatch out of these.
- hashgowda 9y agoI 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 ?
- 15155 9y agoDropping wire is the absolute best way to go, however: A properly thought-out wireless system is the second-best way. This might consist of P2P links, multiple access points, etc. over the subject property. That's not to say this is expensive, check out Ubiquiti and Ruckus products for examples of the kinds of radios you need to make this happen. All should fairly affordable in comparison to renting a trenching tool and dropping cable.
- i2pi 9y agoWe have p2p wifi between our barn and farm house. The barn is powered by solar. I use engenius WAPs, a 100Ah battery, 2 100W solar panels, a $15 solar charge controller, various buck/boost converters for other power requirements. The system also powers an LTE repeater and LTE modem, to provide the farm with internet access.
- JohnKacz 9y agoI'm planning on getting a few Xenon from Particle to do something similar. https://www.particle.io/mesh https://www.particle.io/mesh
- ritanelson 9y agoI strongly recommend the service of cyberguru to anyone who needs the service of a hacker. he helped me find out about my cheating boyfriend's activity with more than enough prove. he hacked into his phone and directed his call log,text message and socia media messages to my phone which made me able to confront him and cut off the relationship. contact him via email at cyberguru1370@gmail.com. contact for help