Reviewing four $3 wifi cameras in far too much detail

I have just received a package from AliExpress and in that package there are cameras. So, let's open them up and take a look. These are cheap and nasty, probably very nasty mini Wi-Fi cameras. When I say cheap, I mean about three Franks a shot. Really cheap. I have very low expectations of these things, but I am actually genuinely interested in this bottom tier electronics. And I really want to see what's inside them and whether they're at all hackable and you know if they're any good, which they won't be. This one, this is a security camera HD mini fullcolor night vision highdefinition something monitor waterproof motion detect surveillance smartome color one piece camera produced by them. If it's waterproof that would be very cool but I bet it's not. Let's just mark this just so I can distinguish between them and then open the box. This is all real. I haven't opened these yet. And and it's upside down. And there is the camera and the instruction manual. We get a thing. It's presumably some sort of mount for putting the camera on, a USB cable with USBs on one end, the camera itself, and a plastic box. The camera is bigger than I was expecting. Peel the peely thing. It feels pretty cheap. It's not great plastic. Got the tiny little lens on the back. There's not a lot. Presumably, this is the mount for this thing. Ah, it's magnetic. Bottom has a socket. The top has some buttons. Well, that's minimal. Oh, card slot and some vents. So, what have we got in the manual? We have Chinese on this side, English on this side. It wants me to download an app, set my phone to a custom Wi-Fi network, wireless fidelity, and then connect the app to that. Okay, so this thing does not connect to an existing Wi-Fi network. It starts its own, which is annoying. I have it charging and I've scanned the barcode with this phone which is not my main phone. Let's install the application which is called linkal mo privacy policy. If I do I do not agree. Right. It just exits. Okay. Apparently I need to create an account. I was finally able to create an account. So, let's add a device. [clears throat] Okay. Okay. The blue light is flashing, which means it should be in discoverable mode. And it wants Bluetooth. It's found a thing. Okay, that's interesting. It seems to have used Bluetooth to set the Wi-Fi network on this. So now this is actually connected to my own Wi-Fi network. Okay, yes, I figured it out. So now we need to wait for it to do a thing. See the lights are blinking. Okay. Configure device one. No. Okay. What can we do? Oh, we got a picture. Here [snorts] you are seeing my workbench. Here is my OBS. Here is my oscilloscope. That doesn't look too immediately terrible actually. Let's take a picture. Looking at the picture on the big screen, that is not very well focused. And it is also only 640x480, so not 1080p. But I do also observe that this particular box doesn't actually mention that it's 1080p anywhere. So I suppose they get away with that one. An interesting aspect of the Linkl Mo app is if the device supports it, you can use it as an intercom. This one doesn't. There is also has a night vision mode which makes the picture go black and white. I will insert here what happens if you actually take the camera outside into the dark in night vision mode. Well, that was interesting. Okay, let's move on to the next one. Oh, yeah. And one important thing. Let's just label this as device one. Next, let's take a look at the sports HD TV DV. And this one does say it's 1080p. This one is device two. Two. Maybe that pen needs replacing. This is a SQ11 mini camera, 1080p HD micro camera, 30 frame action video camera, sports TV, outdoor night vision, smart camera for security. Sensor size black by them. It also has an interesting set of specs on the back. Notice that support system Windows ME 2000XP 2003 Vista, but no version of Windows newer than that. Luckily for me, I use Linux. And yes, very clearly 720p 1080p. So, let's open this one up. And of course, it is still upside down. And what do we get? We get a manual, a plastic thing, another plastic thing, a interestingly non-standard cable, and a camera in a bag. This one is smaller, but feels just as trash. It looks like there's a marginally better lens. It's still tiny, but it is at least anti-reflection coated. These may be infrared LEDs for night vision mode, or they may be fake. It does seem to be held together by a rubber band. Oh, I think it actually is held together by the rubber band. Yeah, it covers up the very ugly seam. There is one screw holding it together. On this side, we have the flash card slot and the non-standard USB connector. On this side, we have two buttons. [clears throat] And that's about all you get. The stand's interesting. You've got this thing which is a lapel clip that this thing plugs into like so. And can then either be stuck on a pocket or stuck onto this thing which can then be screwed to a wall. That's not terrible. It's all really cheap. The manual is in a million languages and folds out to be a huge piece of paper. But the only bit we're interested in is this column. So here are the specs. Yes, it says that those things are an infrared lamp. The machine built-in rechargeable lithium battery. First time using this machine. Please charge. Can be charged by the following way. Let me just plug that in actually. So there it is charging away with the red light on. So it's not completely dead after charging. Flashing red light. Full of red lights. Long said charge red light. Please charge again more than 30 minutes. Ensure the battery is 100%. Click on off button to boot. Boot blue light normally on. Click on the switch machine under the blue lights. Flash three out of 720p video. Video process lamp. Don't suggest a segmented automatically. Save 5 minutes continuous video. Cycle cover. Click the switch button again to stop video. Black to the blue light. Normally on standby mode. Wow, it's been a while since I've seen any mangled translation that good. Motion detecting mode in the blue light standby mode. Press mode key for 3 seconds. Red light flashing on the long three under blue lights. Open motion detecting video mode. Both detected objects move after red and blue lights flash for 720p mobile video at the same time. A period of 5 minutes. Automatic packaging to save. Don't cover cycle cover. There is no moving object. Standby all the time without electricity or T-card record. Click on any button. One exit detecting mode. This this is going to be a challenge to figure out how to use. I have to say I cannot make this thing do anything useful at all. Occasionally it will show a light and sometimes the light will flash. Let's try this. There we go. Flashy light and it settles back to blue. Sometimes it goes red, sometimes it goes blue. It's drawing no current over USB. I think the battery is not charging. The manual is completely inscrutable. It's not just the English. I tried translating the other languages and they're all equally incomprehensible. I did think to try and look for Chinese, but actually this turns out to be Japanese. So, there is no native Chinese instructions. Maybe it doesn't come from China. I'm going to put this aside and leave it to charge for a while in the hope that something will happen. But in the meantime, let's move on to the last two. These came from different listings on AliExpress. Honest, the pictures look quite different even though they are clearly the same box and in fact they come from the same manufacturer. So, what is this? It's an A9 Wi-Fi mini camera, wireless video recorder, security protection camera, smart home monitoring camera for infants and pets. And like the other one, the sensor size is black. So, what do we get in the box? Hey, it's the right way up this time. A manual. It's a Zot cam. Here is the camera. It's a lump with a magnetic sticky bit on it. Is that a screen protector or is it just scratched? It's just scratched. It's got onoff and mode just like the other cameras and a card slot just like the other cameras and a very small webcam sensor under a piece of glass just like the other cameras. Oh, look. It's got one of these. Oh, look. It's got one of these. The manual looks very suspiciously similar. It's not linkal mode. But this time it's Zot Cam, but it looks like the same thing. And oh, look, you have to register account. Of course you do. Linkl mode does not seem to want to detect this thing. So, let's go ahead and install Zot and see how bad that is. The two barcodes on the manual are different. The one on the left takes you to a page where you can get the manual, the video operations guide, and a lot of adverts to scammy recurring subscription games. The barcode on the right takes you to this page, which has also got the adverts for the scammy games, but does allow you to download the app. And this takes me to apparently it wants me to download something. Is it going to take me to the Play Store eventually? Yes. All the buttons that said download were just the scammy games. I'm having a really good feeling about this one. Right. Zot cam. It wants me to create an account. Oh, wait. There's a guest login. Nice. That's actually useful. Okay. It wants this. You have it once. Add device. Okay, Bluetooth has found a device. >> Connect to your home router and support only 2.4G. Enter your router password and press next. >> Quality. So, that connected fairly seamlessly. You've added one device. Here is the device. What happens when I press buttons? Nothing. Photos. Nothing. The lights on this thing have come on. both blue and red, although there you can just see the red, but it's not actually doing anything. Resolution gives options for full HD, HD, and SD, which is nice. Infrared light can be turned on or off. Flip flips their stock image. Right, I power cycled everything. And here is the camera showing my oscilloscope. That looks terrible. Yes, that's definitely full HD. This clearly isn't a scam at all. Yeah, that is 240 by 320. Okay, I don't think I need to let that charge for any longer. So, I will turn it off. Is it going to turn off? Turn it off. and stick it back into the box. And let's take a look at number four. This I reckon is going to be identical, possibly in a different form factor. This is a 1080p new X5 mini camera night vision lightweight portable premium cams motion detection wireless surveillance camera. And once again, the sensor size is that most popular of sizes, black. So, what do we have? It's the right way up. We've got a wire, a USB, a completely genuine quality control tag from checker number 12, and in here is the camera. in a little bag almost like it's satur button. That's interesting. Yeah. Now, that's my fingerprint, by the way. Okay. Well, let's plug it in. And we got the usual red and blue lights. Uh the color pattern looks unnervingly familiar. And let's take a look at the manual. Great. So, at least we don't have to install a new app. Let's add a device. Bluetooth provisioning. It spotted this. It's remembered the Wi-Fi password I gave it, which I will have to change. Oh, we got a picture. It's terrible. Well, the best thing you can say about these is they're not quite as bad as the 240x321. These are in fact 640x480, which is higher resolution, but it's still not quite the full HD it was advertising. Notice the indicator light is on. Yeah, that turns the blue LED on and off. I'm guessing that the use case for these is definitely watching over people's pets or babies or something like that and nothing at all about, you know, secretreting them into places where you shouldn't put a camera. Although, given the picture quality, meanwhile, I did some more playing with this, it did not come to life. Even when I installed a card in it, let it charge for a while, plugged it straight into a computer, etc. In fact, it does show up as a UVC camera when plugged into a computer, except all that comes out is black. So, I think this thing's DOA. Well, given that there's screw there, let's undo it and see what there is. Ah, free tiny screw. And it just seems to pull apart. Not quite. There's something holding it together. Right. All it needed was a bit of brute force. Okay. And what's inside? We've got a small board. Very small board. The biggest component on that is the card reader. We've got a very very tiny lithium battery. All the actual works are on the other side. Yeah, you can just see the signs of a microcontroller in there. So, yeah, this black thing seems to poke up here and that is where the infrared LEDs would be if there were any infrared LEDs. There's a screw. And there's another screw. That one's rusty. And this comes apart. We've got a PCB. Here is the camera sensor unit. Here is a completely fake set of LEDs. That's just a very standard offthe-shelf camera module. And that is a EA265298. I cannot find any reference to microcontrollers with either of those numbers, but I did find that EA265298 is a Subaru that was once for sale somewhere in Africa. So that's useful. This, I bet, is a microphone. This will be where the T red LEDs would have been connected. H. I wonder if that was supposed to have a resistor. Clock crystal. [snorts] Over on this side, we have the focus. Focus battery and a thing. Hey, I recognize some of those numbers. That's a serial flash chip. But I want to measure the battery voltage because I don't think that battery is in very great condition. Now to try to find a way to do this without shorting out the battery. There we go. One volt. That battery is DOA. Look what happens to the battery when I do this. It's squishy. Yes, that battery is extremely dead and I need to dispose of it humanely. So, I looked that up and it is indeed a half megabyte flash chip. So, that is interesting. And I may need to remove this from the board and dump it later. Do wonder what this microcontroller is. So, I've done some research on this thing. Notice how it says SQ11 here on the incomprehensible manual. Well, turns out there's a very similar camera by a company called Quellmer, which this is very clearly a bootleg copy of. The Qumer camera even has, you know, the color strike. The Qumer one has actual 1080p and, you know, real night vision LEDs and motion sensitive capturing and all the nice stuff like that that this doesn't have. So, what we're looking at here is a budget copy of a better camera, which is interesting. I also found someone else who bought one of these, which also had a dead battery, and pulled it apart and dumped the flash. And it seems to be MIP's instructions, which is very interesting. But what's even weirder, the flash chip in this thing is half a megabyte, but there's only 4K of code on it. The rest of it's blank. So, yes, I'm definitely going to take a look at that later. But for now, I've done some playing with this thing. It is considerably happier now that the dead battery is not plugged in. It won't start up at all unless it thinks the battery is charged, but it's still not very happy. So, what I'm going to do is reassemble it because I actually kind of don't want it to break until I finish with it and attach this battery that I know is good. It's just another 3.7 volt lithium battery, so there shouldn't be any problems there. It just won't fit in the box. So, now that the battery is hooked up, let's try turning it on and seeing what happens. I've inserted a card cuz this device doesn't have Wi-Fi and it will need a card to be happy. So, I think it's this button. Oh, doing something. And now it's stopped doing something. Sadly, adding a battery to this thing did not actually help. It seems to be deeply confused about something, and I don't know what, and I cannot make it do anything useful at all. Whatever I do, it now just sort of blinks its light plaintively at me, like so. If I plug it into the power, I get different light blinking, but doesn't take any pictures. It does write a text file to the card containing what it thinks is the current date, but that doesn't really help. So, I think that something has broken. The good news is that I spent some time, like a good couple of days, poking at the firmware image of this flash chip, and I can report that it is not MIP. I was wrong. It is open risk, an architecture that I've never encountered in real life before. And this is a very strange variant of it, which is both little Indian and has the delay slots feature disabled. And yeah, but it looks like this chip is programmable with the right clip, which I don't have. But if this can be programmed on the board, then there's an interesting project reverse engineering this and making it do something useful. But anyway, let's put this aside and get on to the main event. And now the bit you've all been waiting for. We get to find out what the video quality is like. And it should come as no surprise to anyone to find out that they are, as they say in Australia, complete garbo. So, device one. So, here we are with device one looking out my window cuz that's the only place where there's enough Wi-Fi. So, as far as I can tell, when this thing's turned on and there's a card in it, it always and doesn't need a Wi-Fi connection, but it does a very bad job of actually saving files to the card, and they're frequently corrupted. Given the video quality, I'm not sure this really counts as a big loss. Device two, as I did not finish. Device three. Here is device three. Once again, recording directly to the card from my balcony because I can't be bothered to make the stupid phone app work. There is not really a lot to say about this other than the fact that it's terrible. and device four. And this is device 4, which has slightly better image quality than device 3, but makes up for it by being incredibly unreliable and having a defunct battery. So, I have to have this plugged into a USB power bank to operate. Technically, they work. You can set them up and record video with them, but you're not getting much out of these things. I would like to send particular curses in the direction of device 3 here, which while it is not the worst quality video camera I have, that one's going to appear in a video sometime, is still very, very bad. It doesn't help that the phone apps that drive these things are total trash as well. They are adridden barely functional pieces of garbage. Linklmo, which was device ones, does score very slightly higher in that it usually works, but Zot that does these two. I did manage to record video via the Wi-Fi link onto the phone, but then you can't get the video out of the app. You can download still pictures, but you can't download video. Luckily, I discovered that all three of these things, if you just turn them on and don't touch the phone app, will record video onto the SD card in the slot. So, that is what I did. But, as I think we're basically done using these as cameras, let's take the lid off and see how they work. So, what have we got? That metal thing is the magnet. Then we have a battery that wasn't glued in in any way. And then the board, which is not fastened in in any way. Wow. This is a thing. The camera looks slightly better than device 2's. It says at least bigger. Oh, it's not actually fastened down. Does at least have a socket, SD card, piece of rubber to hold the battery down, and a chip, a Beckan BK7252. It looks like it's a reasonably high-end IoT chip with half a meg of RAM and 4 meg of flash. It does 54 megabit Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a bajillion other features. It also has these two pads here marked RX and TX for a serial UART. So depending whether the documentation's available, I couldn't figure out what CPU architecture it actually is. This might be interestingly hackable. One thing it doesn't have is a serial flash chip. So the only way of actually reprogramming the thing is via the serial link. Okay. Next device three. I'm expecting this to be very similar. Three and four were the same manufacturer. One and three are different manufacturers. So it'll be interesting to see how different it is. I think not very. This one doesn't have any screws, so we just spudge it open. What have we got? We've got a Oh, the batter is actually glued in. We've got a PCB. This looks oddly familiar. peel this back. And it's a Oh, that's a different manufacturer. That's a TXW817 by Squiggle. The manufacturer seems to be Tyin. Apologies for any misprononunciation. It's a little bit lower spec than the Beckham and it is built around a CPU architecture called Sea Sky, which I'd never heard of prior to reverse engineering these things, but it looks like a perfectly chulant chip. There are some signs online of people reverse engineering them to do their own firmware. It also, I noticed now, comes free with a pleasantly bulgy battery. So yeah, device four, the one with no power button. It just has this one reset button. Also, this is the one where the actual back isn't fastened on very well. Yeah, I can just pull it apart my fingers. And what's in this? Well, it's a different design. The camera is glued down. There we go. And as expected, it is in fact the same chip. Also, I discovered why the battery on this one wasn't charging. They didn't attach one. So, let's summarize. Are these cameras any good? No, they're dreadful. Should you buy one? No, they're dreadful. The production quality is terrible. The parts are substandard. The software is a bugridden mess. The only reason these things exist is to fool people into buying them so that they will play with them for 10 minutes, try and fail to make them work, and then throw them away. These are instant e-waste. That is their purpose to be thrown away. Except for these to work at all, there is a certain degree of irreducible complexity they have to have or they just won't function. So, they have to have a camera interface, an SD card reader, a USB interface, a radio, a battery, and above all, they have to have a CPU capable of running all the software. Now, the software is terrible, but the CPU still has to run it. If any of this stuff breaks, the camera doesn't work. And the whole point of these is to run just long enough to make people think they're real cameras. So, there is here the core of a highly functional device. In fact, all three of these boards have part numbers on them, and I found lots of references to these exact part numbers in much better cameras. So, I suspect that these boards are actually used in a whole slew of different cameras, not just these terrible ones. And that what the manufacturer's actually done is they've bought a job lot of boards and then they've slapped them together with the cheapest possible components like the camera sensors and the batteries for those cameras which had batteries and pushed them into plastic boxes in order to sell them. And that raises some interesting possibilities. If these boards function well enough to be useful, and it's pretty clear that they do, then that means these devices suddenly become a source of these boards at like three Franks a shot. It's not like you're wasting much money taking them out of the box and throwing away the camera. They can be reprogrammed. I found multiple projects doing this. These pads here all connect to various useful things on the chip. There's a proprietary debugging interface that is now reasonably well understood. These have a lot of functionality and a lot of computing power. This one has quarter of a meg of RAM. The Becken had half a meg of RAM. This is the one I'm mainly interested in, mostly because it's not very well understood and also having the code on a serial flash chip makes it rather easier to get at and is more my style of things. I think that this is rather lower spec than the other three because it doesn't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or anything like that. From poking at the firmware image, I think it's got 64K of RAM, but that's still twice what the computers I grew up with had in a much smaller form factor for a trivially small price. Of course, those computers also had a keyboard, which this doesn't. Plus, it's the only real life open device I've ever seen. So yeah, these are trash, but they're really interesting and potentially useful trash. The fact that these are available for such a small price is an indication of just how powerful economies of scale are. And I hope that one day someone, possibly me, probably not me, will figure out how to reuse these bottom tier devices to get actual useful work done for really cheap. The smart watches I was looking at a little while back, they were cheap trash. They also functioned as smart watches. The software was garbage. If you could write some, you know, open- source smartwatch software and port it to these devices and find a way to flash the devices that didn't involve having to solder microscopic things on the PCB, which I should add was not fun. They'd be perfectly functional smartwatches. Admittedly, the bio sensors are just fake, but they tell the time. So, I'm not going to throw these away. I'm going to keep these and I'm going to put an order in for the various bits of hardware I need to talk to the devices and I'm going to play with them. You can apparently just install the chip vendor sample firmware on one of these cuz these are just based on the standard reference designs. All the functionalities in the chip. So all these devices will be the same except this one. This one's different. And of course, this one is a different CPU architecture to these two, but the same applies for this one. With so much RAM and a card reader and potentially, if this can be reprogrammed, a high bandwidth IO interface, you could get real work done on one of these. They'd run physics very nicely. So, that's it for now. I hope you all enjoyed my tour through this egregious pile of e-waste. I'm intrigued and you'll be relieved to know that I am not getting rid of this manual because this is amazing. I feel like I need to do a dramatic reading of it. So, I'm leaving it here. I hope you all enjoyed this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments and I will see you all next time. During which I will hopefully remember to turn my nice microphone on.