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· by OpenIPC team

A camera with no speaker plays tunes, and shares itself by link

The IR-cut filter's coil becomes a buzzer that plays Nokia ringtones, Wi-Fi is set up by showing the camera a QR code, and a camera can be shown to anyone by a link.

What's new:

  • A camera can beep even with no speaker in it. It beeps with the infrared filter: the coil that moves it clicks on every pulse, and a few hundred pulses a second turn the clicks into a hum whose pitch you choose. Exactly how the Commodore 1541 drive was made to sing in 1985 — it played Daisy Bell with its head. The firmware has ready-made cues, and you can send a tune of your own in RTTTL. That is the Nokia ringtone format: any of those thousands of tunes plays unchanged. Handy for hearing that a camera has booted or that the network is gone, and for working out which of five cameras on the roof is the one. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/ircut-tunes.md

  • Wi-Fi is set up with a QR code: show the camera a code and it reads it itself. Firmware with the scanner looks for a code for half a minute after power-on. A code from our generator will do, and so will the one a phone shows when it shares its network; spaces and non-Latin letters in the password are no trouble. The camera first makes sure the network lets it in, and only then saves. It reports the result on that same filter: two short rising notes — the code was read; four notes up — connected, got an address, saving and rebooting; three low buzzes — wrong password. If it did not work, the camera keeps looking: fix the code on the phone and show it again. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/wireless-settings.md#or-show-the-camera-a-qr-code

  • A camera can be handed to your own AI assistant to identify. The procedure for it is at agents.md, and the report page has a ready-made line: copy it to the assistant and it works on its own from there. First it runs ipctool and asks the catalogue whether it knows the board. It does — that is it, take the firmware. It does not — the assistant takes the boot log and the U-Boot environment, reads the flash with your permission, and sends a report. The rules are on the page too: the camera has to be yours, no guessing passwords, and the whole flash only with permission, because your Wi-Fi passwords are in it. Nothing goes anywhere until the project team has reviewed the report, and the MAC, the die number and the cloud id are replaced with hashes when it is published. https://openipc.org/cameras/report https://openipc.org/agents.md

  • The board catalogue. Every board we have, sorted by maker: one board, one card, even if five sources wrote about it. Open a card and you see what each of them says — the maker's documentation, a seller's firmware, the Anjoy Vision archive, what owners sent in. Search goes by the text and not only the name, so a board is found by a chip marking or by a line out of a boot log. What you have open is what is in the address: send the link and the other person sees exactly that. https://openipc.org/cameras/boards

  • The OpenIPC Club. Got a board? Tell us about it straight from its page: the boot log, the U-Boot console, ipctool's output, photos, a flash dump. Sign in and what you sent stays yours; you can sign in through the Telegram bot, through GitHub, or by a link to your email. Each accepted item earns a star, and a dump we did not have earns ten. Dumps are seen by you and the project team only. https://openipc.org/club

  • A camera can be shown by a link. You make the link on the camera itself and send it to whoever you like: they open it in a browser and see the camera. No port to forward and no VPN to raise. The link's key sits in the address after the hash, and browsers do not send that part of an address to a server — so we do not have it, and the camera and the guest check each other themselves. The link opens not just the picture but the camera's whole interface. And if you gave view-only access, the guest gets a player with sound, a snapshot and full screen: WebRTC first, under a second of latency; if that will not go, MSE; MJPEG at worst.

Also worth a look:

  • The supported hardware page opens with four ways to install OpenIPC, easiest first: buy a camera that already has it; switch your own over the air with a Coupler image; open it up and read the chip marking; ask the community. Then comes the chip table, and each one says whether it installs by the guide, is for the experienced only, or cannot be done yet. https://openipc.org/supported-hardware

  • Firmware is now looked up by chip: pick the chip, then the variant, then the build from a calendar of the nights it was built on. https://openipc.org/firmware-explorer