I receive ads from 123securityproducts.com. They seem to be typical of sites selling security cameras, although I only rarely look at the other sites, as I haven't been actively shopping for equipment in this space for a few years.
The vast majority of the products they advertise are still analog cameras, usually sold in multi-camera bundles, with a central DVR (running some buggy Linux firmware, often with no source code provided). The ad I received today was one of the rare few promoting an actual IP camera. It has better resolution than you typically see. Instead of merely VGA or QVGA, its a 2.43 MP sensor, with a fixed lens. (A 2000 x 1241 pixel sensor, outputting 1920 x 1080 using H.264 at 30 FPS.) It also supports Power-over-Ethernet, which is good, but they want over $300 for this: https://www.123securityproducts.com/knc-hdi47b37.html I get that pro-grade hardware carries a premium, but the capabilities of this camera are likely blown away by a sub-$50 Android smartphone, which likely comes with a 3 MP camera, plus has WiFi and GSM radios. It seems easy to imagine how one could take a low-end smartphone SoC, combined with a high volume 5 MP camera module made for phones, and add a wired Ethernet port with PoE and some IR LEDS for night illumination, with production costs under $100, and a retail price of around $100. Replace Android with a very minimalist Linux or other open source RTOS optimized for reliability, and you'd have a great camera platform. Why haven't we seen this? Or is it out there, but I just haven't ran across its? Has anyone ran across any communities dealing with creating custom third party firmware for consumer or pro-sumer grade IP cameras? (Thee are plenty that run Linux and many that even provide source, but I haven't seem any communities form around hacking camera firmware.) Directly using these $50 smartphones is another option. There are apps to turn a phone into a security camera. But aside from the lens angle not necessarily being optimal for a security monitoring application, to make it a serious contender as a security camera you'd really need to replace Android with something more reliable, or at least make sure the phone has a good hardware watchdog, and customize the watchdog code to validate that all the functions critical to the camera are operational. (It would still be less than ideal due to using WiFi for networking and requiring local power and not having a mounting bracket.) -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
