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WiFi cameras like many other devices these days come equipped with some sort of Linux subsystem. This makes the life of a tinkerer easier and you know what that means. [Tomas C] saw an opportunity to mod his Xiaomi Dafang IP camera which comes configured to work only with proprietary apps and cloud.

The hack involves voiding the warranty by taking the unit apart and installing custom firmware onto it. Photos posted by [Tomas C] show the mainboard powered by an Ingenic T20 which is a popular IP Camera processor featuring some image and video processing sub-cores. Upon successful flashing of the firmware, the IP camera is now capable of a multitude of things such as remote recording and playback which can be configured using the web UI as documented by [Tomas C]

We did a little more digging on the custom firmware and discovered that the original author of the custom firmware, [EliasKotlyar] has done a lot of work on this project. There are loads of images of the teardown of a camera and an excellent set of documentation of how he made the hack. Everything from adding serial headers, getting root access, dumping the firmware and even toolchain links are given on the page. This is extremely handy for a newbie looking to get into the game.

And IP Cameras are not of the only hackable hardware out in the wild. There are other devices that are running Linux based firmware such as the Wifi SD Cards that run OpenWRT. Check out the essential guide to compiling OpenWRT from source if you are looking to get started with your next IP Camera hack.

Thanks for the tip [Orlin82]