[Letux-kernel] X1600 upstreaming efforts

[H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi Paul,

> Am 21.04.2025 um 23:05 schrieb Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk>:
> 
> P.S. I saw this site recently:
> 
> https://thingino.com/

Really interesting!

> 
> I think these people are just modifying vendor kernels of a 3.x vintage, 
> presumably not helped by the general secrecy around Ingenic's video processor 
> range, but one of the cameras emerged on my radar, available from Pimoroni as 
> a Sonoff model:
> 
> https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/sonoff-smart-home-wi-fi-security-camera-cam-slim

It is also available through other dealers here in Germany. Looks interesting to reverse engineer :)

> 
> Interestingly, another "home camera" I saw recently was the TP-Link Tapo C200:

It seems to be much more widespread than the Sonoff (Amazon shows 135 thousand reviewers worldwide and 73% with 5 stars).
But there are also critical comments: has no web interface, is broken after 3 months, software instable...

> 
> https://www.argos.co.uk/product/4667999
> https://drmnsamoliu.github.io/hardware.html

Getting into a shell is interesting:

https://drmnsamoliu.github.io/shell.html

Well, at that point one could analyse the /sbin/init and /initrd stuff and hack in starting a shell there so that everything
is properly initialized before...

I did a similar thing some years ago with an Edimax WLAN power switch. It turned out to run a MIPS Linux and there
was a trick to telnet into the device after connecting WLAN.

But at some point I gave up. Maybe it was because I could not set up WLAN without their Smartphone based
App and they did update their servers in an incompatible way. Or a newer model came out than I had and
I would have to start from scratch.

> https://github.com/nervous-inhuman/tplink-tapo-c200-re
> https://dalpix.com/reverse-engineering-ip-camera-part-4
> 
> It uses a Realtek RTS3903 SoC which is a MIPS-based processor with 64MB of 
> RAM. There is a sibling product, the C100, which also apparently uses this 
> SoC.

Strangely this seems to be an Ethernet Switch chip:

https://www.realtek.com/Product/Index?id=3719&cate_id=194

Generally I think (after all the years of "opening" commercial products) that the better strategy is to support
already open development boards and/or develop your own commercial product based on it... Reverse Engineering
third party products is running against walls and daily risk of end of life of the product so the user-base will drain out.

BR,
Nikolaus