Worthy thread to ask: is there such a thing as a white label IP camera (or similar) with a supported open firmware? Not asking for open source, but something close to plug and play that nonetheless has a way of stripping the rootfs as desired for bespoke use in a manufacturer-supported way.
I have looked around before but I only found genuinely dev-oriented kits that weren't even in a shell, and crazy priced.
edit: seems there are some options now (or I missed them before), e.g. https://www.goodcam.io/#for-independent-developers
I wrote Wyrecam (https://github.com/radredgreen/wyrecam) to solve this problem. It works as well as Apple HomeKit works, which isn't all that well. Firmware supports wyze v3 (ingenic t31).
Not exactly open firmware, but something like ONVIF on an isolated network is pretty close. An ONVIF camera should talk to basically any NVR (network video recorder), there are several open-source ones available.
There are tons of ONVIF-compliant and cheap PoE cameras, and with this setup you really don't care about the security of the manufacturer firmware since you aren't exposing them to the network publicly. However, you do need to be extra diligent when configuring your VLAN/network segmentation.
There is also https://thingino.com/ which has a clear set of supported cameras. The installation is straight forward if you choose a cam with SD-Card flashing support. I upgraded two of the Sonoff Slim Gen2 without any issues.
I also use thingino and it was very easy to use. It has wireguard support, but I just set up my firewall so cams are only accessible over tailscale.
You can get close.... I guess...
Some cameras do support thingino, so you can override their firmware. Then there's this: https://openipc.org/supported-hardware/featured
Seems like the shop is broken?
> Stránka nenalezena
> There's been a glitch...
> We're not quite sure what went wrong. You can go back, or try looking on our homepage.
Huh, it was working an hour ago. The outdoor 8MP variant was around the 85 euro mark.
Czech for 'page not found'
ESP32-CAM
I so want these to be a viable solution but man my experience so far is that it can barely be made to work and only in the most favorable environments. Compare that to the blink cameras I used to run outside where it occasionally went below -20F and they still went over a year on a couple batteries.
Not exactly what you have asked for, but ESP32 based M5Stack and Seeed Xiao modules might fit the bill. They are not so expensive, are Linux-free, and there's no report so far of secret ping home features in the SDK.
Thank you. Ordered one to play around and see if this is a viable alternative.
I wish... The best I've found is https://openipc.org/ which is a very manufacturer unsupported way of reflashing certain chips with open-source firmware. It seems very fiddly as only certain SoCs are supported and good luck finding out if a specific Chinese camera has one.