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

There&#x27;s a virtuous cycle thing going on here: Someone releases a product with hackable&#x2F;open specs (Xiaomi has a good track record here), people are overjoyed because you can&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a lot of great hardware out there but the API&#x27;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&#x27;s sleep habits (using some custom scripts &#x2F; classification &#x2F; etc). Guide&#x27;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 &#x2F; API&#x27;s. There&#x27;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&#x27;ve messaged a few of them telling them &quot;I&#x27;d buy 1000 of these if I can put my own firmware on them&quot; but haven&#x27;t gotten any good responses. What I&#x27;m aiming for sometimes gets lost in translation, but mostly I think they just don&#x27;t get the premise I&#x27;m presenting to sales people who answer the Alibaba inquiries.

I 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?

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&#x27;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&#x27;t force you to connect to some cloud service?

Any cool use cases?