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 extra software), profit for the parent company.<p>Basically, the company gets a bunch of people to do work for free, the product gets improved, the company makes profit, everybody wins.
This 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.
I 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.
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?<p>Has anybody worked on above issues ?
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?