Hack NeosCam / WyzeCam v2
The NeosCam is a great value camera, retailing at around £30 on Amazon in the UK. But who likes the idea of a constant video stream in your home being sent to servers in China, America, France… anywhere. You don’t know and have no control over it.
So i am going to show you how to hack these cheap cameras and introduce you to an opensource project, Dafang, which allows us to manage these cameras locally and access them via RTSP Protocol which we can connect to our own NVR System.
So why not use these as they already are?
Everyone has different opinions on cloud based devices, some love them, some hate them and many like me just don’t trust them. Sure they may have tightly monitored protocols and be encrypted to whatever standard is deemed secure… but never the less, you are sending thousands of videos from inside your home to a server that you have no control over. It’s up to you if you care or not, but personally i like to manage my own devices and software, the main reason for me is so that i can integrate it with my BlueIris NVR and Home Assistant.
Ready to Turn off the cloud? Let's go!
Here are instructions for installing the bootloader to the camera:
Step 1
First, you need an SD Card, it is recommended to use a 512MB one since these tend to work a lot better. If you don’t have a 512MB one like me, you can just create a 512MB partition on any SD Card. To do this click on This PC in the file explorer, then Manage in the ribbon bar:
Now you should be in the computer management console. Click on Disk Management on the left hand side, under the Storage drop down. Now you will see all of your disks that your PC is connected to. You should see your SD Card here if it is plugged in, mine is a 32GB SD Card which i can see as Disk 2, Drive E:
If your Drive shows a blue bar along the top of it like mine does, we need to remove the current volume. To do that, right click on the white section (that says 29.72GB in my case), click Delete Volume, then click Yes.
Congrats, now the SD Card is wiped of any volumes we need to create our 512MB one. To do this, right click on the white space again, (it should say “Unallocated” this time, then click New Simple Volume. Then the simple volume wizard should show up, click next and it should ask you to specify a volume size. In the box type in 512 then click next and next again. Now we need to format the partition, make sure that the File System selected is FAT32 it won’t work otherwise. Then click next and Finish.
Step 2
Now our SD card is ready to be used. First we need to install our boot loader to the camera, to do this download this binary file and copy it to the SD card, make sure that this is the only file on there and that you do not change the name of the file.
Step 3
Now we need to install the bootloader to the camera, now make sure your camera is unplugged and insert the SD Card with the demo.bin file on it. Now hold down the setup button on the camera and power it up keep the button pressed for 10 seconds after powering up. Now leave the camera for approximately 2 minutes to be sure that the bootloader has installed.
Great, bootloader installed! Now lets move to the fun stuff.
Now it’s time to configure our Dafang Software that will run on the camera:
Step 1
Download this folder which includes all of the files which we need for Dafang to run. You may need to extract this folder too since it is a zip file.
Step 2
Now in that folder, we need to edit 1 file which is located in the config folder. It is called “wpa_supplicant.conf”. In here you need to enter your WiFi SSID and Password where it says to, do not edit anything else.
Step 3
Copy everything in the top folder and put it on the SD Card, make sure you remove the demo.bin file we put on there before. Once all of your files are on the card, you can put the card into the camera and plug it in.
You should now be able to access the cameras web interface once it boots up, the username is root and the password is ismart12. It may give you a security warning but you can just click continue or advance.