(TP-Link Firmware Decryption C210 V2 cloud camera bootloaders) https://watchfulip.github.io/28-12-24/tp-link_c210_v2.html?u...
Network devices can at least be monitored and discovered like this.
The thing I've most been convinced of in the past 5 years of building as much 'iot/smart home' stuff out as possible in my house is that nearly every vendor is selling crap that has marginal usefulness outside of a 'party trick' in isolation. Building out a whole smart home setup is frustrating unless it's all from one vendor, but there isn't one vendor which does all of it well for every need.
On my phone I have apps for: Ecobee, Lutron, Hue, 4 separate camera vendors[1], Meross, and Smart Life. Probably a couple more that I'm forgetting.
Only Lutron and Hue are reasonable in that they allow pretty comprehensive control to be done by a hub or HomeKit so I never have to use those apps.
It's been years since Matter and Thread were supposedly settled upon as the new standards for control and networking, but the market is, instead of being full of compatible devices, instead absolutely packed with cheap wi-fi devices, each of which is cloud-dependent and demands to be administered and even used day-to-day only through a pile-of-garbage mobile app whose main purpose is to upsell you on some cloud services.
[1] I admit the fact I have 4 is my fault for opportunistically buying cameras that were cheap rather than at least sticking with one vendor. But many people have a good excuse, perhaps one vendor makes the best doorbell camera, while another might make a better PTZ indoor camera.
Even if your hardware doesn't support local APIs, there's a good chance someone has made an HA integration to talk to their cloud API.
And if they haven’t, you can pretty trivially write your own and distribute it through HACS (I’ve got three integrations in HACS and one in mainline now)
My #1 wish would be for someone to build a HA-native voice assistant speaker. I'd pay $100 each for a smart speaker of the physical quality of the $30 Google Home Mini but which integrated directly with HA and used a modern LLM to decide what the user's intent was, instead of the Google Assistant or Siri nonsense which is like playing a text adventure whose preferred syntax changes hourly. I'd pay that plus a monthly fee to have that exist and just work.
This is the way most apps work if they have a default password the user is supposed to change.
The fact that OP did all this work to find out the dog sleeps is pure hacker culture. Love to see it :)
gnabgib•1h ago
The Tapo C200 research project https://drmnsamoliu.github.io/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813013)
PyTapo: Python library for communication with Tapo Cameras https://github.com/JurajNyiri/pytapo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267062)