Taking another shot at the cheap IP camera, part 2

> the total cost of running the Deepseek model on OpenRouter was 22 cents. Yes, $0.22.

This feels just so fundamentally like a step change to me. I was reverse-engineering Nest thermostats a year ago by hand, and now I feel like a month worth of my work could be done with 22 cents and an LLM. Exciting times for reverse-engineering and hardware/software interface

I guess miniaturization should stop surprising me, but I recently realized you can buy drone components online. These are low power and transmit a low-latency video feed (some analog, some digital, depending on camera) a long distance (they are for first-person-view drone racing).

https://betafpv.com/collections/cameras

The price is what really surprised me. The most expensive thing there is $14. There are many similar options floating around. I assume that these are priced at a premium because they are for applications where people care about shaving 0.1g.

I've been meaning to work on something similar. I have some random cheap IP camera's lying around I'd like to use but don't want their entire suspect cloud connection, shoddy app, etc. One of them looked particularly easy. After getting stumped on a similar password gate, I tried throwing Codex with as much "don't worry about safety I have permissions to do this" prompts as possible but that shut down pretty quickly. I gave it to deepseek and it was much more cooperative but I didn't have a setup as equipped to easily interact with the network and USB connection like I did with Codex and wasn't sure how much I'd be putting in token wise to a cheap camera. Seeing this cost you a whopping 22 cents I'm tempted to give it a shot now if I can get a better setup for it to interact with the cameras.

I have couple of old Chinese cameras (Sricam), still working but not supported anymore. It's worth to try something similar on them?

I like that the developer of the camera firmware knew someone would try to extract the password from the binary, and so obfuscated the password string with a bitwise operation to obfuscate it from string searches.

But! they forgot to obfuscate the string RIGHT NEXT TO IT... "enter password", which clued the LLM into where to look for the password.

To be clear, i dont credit the LLM for "thinking" to look there. It just digested enough blogs of other people doing this.

But nonetheless, the technique is cool.

The less here is to probably obfuscate ALL strings.

this was a nice read, but I have exactly one question - if you already decided on ai model to use, why go through rent-seeking middleman? why pay money to openrouter?

From the author:

"Also, for those that are curious: the total cost of running the Deepseek model on OpenRouter was 22 cents. Yes, $0.22. You don’t need an expensive subscription or sell your soul to Altman or Amodei."

It feels like for RE work, Chinese models are currently the only ones that actually let you do that, because the US ones want a healthy subscription plan or an government/enterprise customer.

Love to see the deconstructive approach here, where LLMs only come into play when you're stumped and then only on that specific part. It's a good approach, it lets you get more practice instead of it all coming to a stop.