[HH] the missing security camera revolution

[Tom Metro]

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