I have just added my photos of the inside of the Edimax IC-3010WG IP camera to my web page: http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
If anyone knows what 'J1' is, I would like to know!
Showing posts with label ic-3010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ic-3010. Show all posts
Friday, 31 December 2010
Inside the Edimax IC-3010WG IP Camera
I have just added my photos of the inside of the Edimax IC-3010WG IP camera to my web page: http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
If anyone knows what 'J1' is, I would like to know!
If anyone knows what 'J1' is, I would like to know!
Thursday, 30 December 2010
Edimax IC-3010 Firmware Modification
I just discovered the 'stats' facility in blogger.com and realised that the most read posts in my blog are the ones about the Edimax IC3010 wireless ip camera. People are also looking at my web pages about it (http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net).
This got me thinking about it again so I have had a poke around inside the case - I'll post some pictures at the weekend.
There is not much to see in side - there is a mini wireless card and a single board computer. I was hoping to see a USB port, but the nearest I can find is a four pin header that is likely to be one (or more of):
- USB Port
- Serial (RS232 ish) console
- JTAG interface
I'll have to find the main system-on-chip pin-outs to try to decide what it is.
The main thing I struggle with is getting into the firmware files - I think the choice if you want to hack a device is to either connect a serial line to the console to get access to the boot loader, or modify the firmware. Modifying the firmware sounds simplest, but you run the risk of turning the device into a brick....
That is about where I got to in the summer of 2009. I am just downloading the latest firmware and source code from edimax to try to de-code the firmware building utility. While I was doing this, I discovered that someone has already done it - http://www.suborbital.org.uk/canofworms/index.php?/archives/3-Getting-telnet-access-on-an-Edimax-IC3010-webcam.html. Well done to them!
This got me thinking about it again so I have had a poke around inside the case - I'll post some pictures at the weekend.
There is not much to see in side - there is a mini wireless card and a single board computer. I was hoping to see a USB port, but the nearest I can find is a four pin header that is likely to be one (or more of):
- USB Port
- Serial (RS232 ish) console
- JTAG interface
I'll have to find the main system-on-chip pin-outs to try to decide what it is.
The main thing I struggle with is getting into the firmware files - I think the choice if you want to hack a device is to either connect a serial line to the console to get access to the boot loader, or modify the firmware. Modifying the firmware sounds simplest, but you run the risk of turning the device into a brick....
That is about where I got to in the summer of 2009. I am just downloading the latest firmware and source code from edimax to try to de-code the firmware building utility. While I was doing this, I discovered that someone has already done it - http://www.suborbital.org.uk/canofworms/index.php?/archives/3-Getting-telnet-access-on-an-Edimax-IC3010-webcam.html. Well done to them!
Edimax IC-3010 Firmware Modification
I just discovered the 'stats' facility in blogger.com and realised that the most read posts in my blog are the ones about the Edimax IC3010 wireless ip camera. People are also looking at my web pages about it (http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net).
This got me thinking about it again so I have had a poke around inside the case - I'll post some pictures at the weekend.
There is not much to see in side - there is a mini wireless card and a single board computer. I was hoping to see a USB port, but the nearest I can find is a four pin header that is likely to be one (or more of):
- USB Port
- Serial (RS232 ish) console
- JTAG interface
I'll have to find the main system-on-chip pin-outs to try to decide what it is.
The main thing I struggle with is getting into the firmware files - I think the choice if you want to hack a device is to either connect a serial line to the console to get access to the boot loader, or modify the firmware. Modifying the firmware sounds simplest, but you run the risk of turning the device into a brick....
That is about where I got to in the summer of 2009. I am just downloading the latest firmware and source code from edimax to try to de-code the firmware building utility. While I was doing this, I discovered that someone has already done it - http://www.suborbital.org.uk/canofworms/index.php?/archives/3-Getting-telnet-access-on-an-Edimax-IC3010-webcam.html. Well done to them!
This got me thinking about it again so I have had a poke around inside the case - I'll post some pictures at the weekend.
There is not much to see in side - there is a mini wireless card and a single board computer. I was hoping to see a USB port, but the nearest I can find is a four pin header that is likely to be one (or more of):
- USB Port
- Serial (RS232 ish) console
- JTAG interface
I'll have to find the main system-on-chip pin-outs to try to decide what it is.
The main thing I struggle with is getting into the firmware files - I think the choice if you want to hack a device is to either connect a serial line to the console to get access to the boot loader, or modify the firmware. Modifying the firmware sounds simplest, but you run the risk of turning the device into a brick....
That is about where I got to in the summer of 2009. I am just downloading the latest firmware and source code from edimax to try to de-code the firmware building utility. While I was doing this, I discovered that someone has already done it - http://www.suborbital.org.uk/canofworms/index.php?/archives/3-Getting-telnet-access-on-an-Edimax-IC3010-webcam.html. Well done to them!
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Embedded Linux Firmware Binary Files
I have always struggled to understand the format of the binary files that store the firmware upgrades.
They tend to be a mixture of some simple text labels, a kernel image and one or more mountable filesystems.
I have written a little script that goes through a file in a brute force (one byte at a time) way and attempts to mount it as various filesystem types (script stored here).
I used the information found by this script, and the source code provided by Edimax to work out some information about the internals of the IC-3010WG IP Camera - it is written up here.
They tend to be a mixture of some simple text labels, a kernel image and one or more mountable filesystems.
I have written a little script that goes through a file in a brute force (one byte at a time) way and attempts to mount it as various filesystem types (script stored here).
I used the information found by this script, and the source code provided by Edimax to work out some information about the internals of the IC-3010WG IP Camera - it is written up here.
Embedded Linux Firmware Binary Files
I have always struggled to understand the format of the binary files that store the firmware upgrades.
They tend to be a mixture of some simple text labels, a kernel image and one or more mountable filesystems.
I have written a little script that goes through a file in a brute force (one byte at a time) way and attempts to mount it as various filesystem types (script stored here).
I used the information found by this script, and the source code provided by Edimax to work out some information about the internals of the IC-3010WG IP Camera - it is written up here.
They tend to be a mixture of some simple text labels, a kernel image and one or more mountable filesystems.
I have written a little script that goes through a file in a brute force (one byte at a time) way and attempts to mount it as various filesystem types (script stored here).
I used the information found by this script, and the source code provided by Edimax to work out some information about the internals of the IC-3010WG IP Camera - it is written up here.
Saturday, 22 August 2009
Practical Experience using the Edimax IP Camera
We were away on holiday last week so I got to try using the Edimax IP camera 'for real' as a monitor to keep an eye on our disabled son - known as 'BenTV-ng' (next generation) to distinguish it from 'BenTV' which was the old analogue system I used to use.
I gave up on using ad-hoc networking and instead took my wireless access point with me. This had the added advantage of improving the range of transmission because I could arrange for the access point to be between the camera and the computer. The computer I used was a Toshiba netbook running Ubuntu Linux.
The first thing I noticed was that when I powered everything up, nothing happened. At first I thought it was because the access point needed to see a wired connection as well as a wireless one, because when I connected the computer to it using a wire things started to work. I soon realised that the range was awful - it stopped working as soon as you were outside of his room. This turned out to be my fault because I had also switched on the analogue camera, which transmitted on the same frequency as the wireless network, so the noise level was huge. Things got better when I switched off the analogue camera.
At first everything appeared to work - vlc rtsp://admin:1234@bentv/ipcam.sdp played the video stream with sound.
I soon noticed that if the network got interrupted vlc froze, giving an apparently good picture, but no movement, which was no use to me. Instead I changed to mplayer - at least if that got into trouble it crashed and closed the video playback window so you knew something was wrong.
I set up a simple shell script that loops indefinitely starting mplayer then when mplayer exits it re-boots the ip camera, waits for 30 seconds and starts mplayer again.
This approach worked pretty well - the 30 second interruptions during the re-boot were not usually too troublesome.
We did find some problems when the video stream only worked for a few seconds before mplayer exited and the re-boot sequence started again, which was no good at all. The only way I found to cure this was to power off the camera all together - a software re-boot via the web interface did not cure it. I'll set up a little test at home now to see how long it takes to get into this state, and whether it makes a difference if you use wireless or wired networking.
The code to achieve this is stored at http://code.google.com/p/ntmisc/source/browse/bentv/.
The most up to date information I have on using this camera with linux can be found at http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
I gave up on using ad-hoc networking and instead took my wireless access point with me. This had the added advantage of improving the range of transmission because I could arrange for the access point to be between the camera and the computer. The computer I used was a Toshiba netbook running Ubuntu Linux.
The first thing I noticed was that when I powered everything up, nothing happened. At first I thought it was because the access point needed to see a wired connection as well as a wireless one, because when I connected the computer to it using a wire things started to work. I soon realised that the range was awful - it stopped working as soon as you were outside of his room. This turned out to be my fault because I had also switched on the analogue camera, which transmitted on the same frequency as the wireless network, so the noise level was huge. Things got better when I switched off the analogue camera.
At first everything appeared to work - vlc rtsp://admin:1234@bentv/ipcam.sdp played the video stream with sound.
I soon noticed that if the network got interrupted vlc froze, giving an apparently good picture, but no movement, which was no use to me. Instead I changed to mplayer - at least if that got into trouble it crashed and closed the video playback window so you knew something was wrong.
I set up a simple shell script that loops indefinitely starting mplayer then when mplayer exits it re-boots the ip camera, waits for 30 seconds and starts mplayer again.
This approach worked pretty well - the 30 second interruptions during the re-boot were not usually too troublesome.
We did find some problems when the video stream only worked for a few seconds before mplayer exited and the re-boot sequence started again, which was no good at all. The only way I found to cure this was to power off the camera all together - a software re-boot via the web interface did not cure it. I'll set up a little test at home now to see how long it takes to get into this state, and whether it makes a difference if you use wireless or wired networking.
The code to achieve this is stored at http://code.google.com/p/ntmisc/source/browse/bentv/.
The most up to date information I have on using this camera with linux can be found at http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
Practical Experience using the Edimax IP Camera
We were away on holiday last week so I got to try using the Edimax IP camera 'for real' as a monitor to keep an eye on our disabled son - known as 'BenTV-ng' (next generation) to distinguish it from 'BenTV' which was the old analogue system I used to use.
I gave up on using ad-hoc networking and instead took my wireless access point with me. This had the added advantage of improving the range of transmission because I could arrange for the access point to be between the camera and the computer. The computer I used was a Toshiba netbook running Ubuntu Linux.
The first thing I noticed was that when I powered everything up, nothing happened. At first I thought it was because the access point needed to see a wired connection as well as a wireless one, because when I connected the computer to it using a wire things started to work. I soon realised that the range was awful - it stopped working as soon as you were outside of his room. This turned out to be my fault because I had also switched on the analogue camera, which transmitted on the same frequency as the wireless network, so the noise level was huge. Things got better when I switched off the analogue camera.
At first everything appeared to work - vlc rtsp://admin:1234@bentv/ipcam.sdp played the video stream with sound.
I soon noticed that if the network got interrupted vlc froze, giving an apparently good picture, but no movement, which was no use to me. Instead I changed to mplayer - at least if that got into trouble it crashed and closed the video playback window so you knew something was wrong.
I set up a simple shell script that loops indefinitely starting mplayer then when mplayer exits it re-boots the ip camera, waits for 30 seconds and starts mplayer again.
This approach worked pretty well - the 30 second interruptions during the re-boot were not usually too troublesome.
We did find some problems when the video stream only worked for a few seconds before mplayer exited and the re-boot sequence started again, which was no good at all. The only way I found to cure this was to power off the camera all together - a software re-boot via the web interface did not cure it. I'll set up a little test at home now to see how long it takes to get into this state, and whether it makes a difference if you use wireless or wired networking.
The code to achieve this is stored at http://code.google.com/p/ntmisc/source/browse/bentv/.
The most up to date information I have on using this camera with linux can be found at http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
I gave up on using ad-hoc networking and instead took my wireless access point with me. This had the added advantage of improving the range of transmission because I could arrange for the access point to be between the camera and the computer. The computer I used was a Toshiba netbook running Ubuntu Linux.
The first thing I noticed was that when I powered everything up, nothing happened. At first I thought it was because the access point needed to see a wired connection as well as a wireless one, because when I connected the computer to it using a wire things started to work. I soon realised that the range was awful - it stopped working as soon as you were outside of his room. This turned out to be my fault because I had also switched on the analogue camera, which transmitted on the same frequency as the wireless network, so the noise level was huge. Things got better when I switched off the analogue camera.
At first everything appeared to work - vlc rtsp://admin:1234@bentv/ipcam.sdp played the video stream with sound.
I soon noticed that if the network got interrupted vlc froze, giving an apparently good picture, but no movement, which was no use to me. Instead I changed to mplayer - at least if that got into trouble it crashed and closed the video playback window so you knew something was wrong.
I set up a simple shell script that loops indefinitely starting mplayer then when mplayer exits it re-boots the ip camera, waits for 30 seconds and starts mplayer again.
This approach worked pretty well - the 30 second interruptions during the re-boot were not usually too troublesome.
We did find some problems when the video stream only worked for a few seconds before mplayer exited and the re-boot sequence started again, which was no good at all. The only way I found to cure this was to power off the camera all together - a software re-boot via the web interface did not cure it. I'll set up a little test at home now to see how long it takes to get into this state, and whether it makes a difference if you use wireless or wired networking.
The code to achieve this is stored at http://code.google.com/p/ntmisc/source/browse/bentv/.
The most up to date information I have on using this camera with linux can be found at http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Ad-Hoc Wireless Network Troubles
Now that I have the Edimax IP Camera working I want it to connect to my Toshiba NB100 netbook computer as simply as possible - the idea is to use it when we are away on holiday so I don't want to have to set up a whole network with an access point etc. Instead I just want to set up an ad-hoc network between the computer and the IP Camera.
According to the instructions this should be easy - I tell the IP Camera to connect to an ad-hoc network called 'bentv', and then use NetworkManager in the Ubuntu desktop of the netbook to create the ad-hoc network.
This works fine on my main laptop, but fails on the netbook.
It turns out that NetworkManager is not capable of putting the wireless card into ad-hoc mode.
The work around was to have the script to start the VLC viewer shutdown network manager and set up the network manually as follows:
This is based on information I found here.
This seems to work, but the wireless networking is a bit iffy after the script exits - I might have to do the wlanconfig destroy bit again to put it into infrastructure mode.
According to the instructions this should be easy - I tell the IP Camera to connect to an ad-hoc network called 'bentv', and then use NetworkManager in the Ubuntu desktop of the netbook to create the ad-hoc network.
This works fine on my main laptop, but fails on the netbook.
It turns out that NetworkManager is not capable of putting the wireless card into ad-hoc mode.
The work around was to have the script to start the VLC viewer shutdown network manager and set up the network manually as follows:
#!/bin/sh
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop
ifconfig ath1 down
wlanconfig ath1 destroy
wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode adhoc
iwconfig ath1 essid bentv
iwconfig ath1 channel 1
iwconfig ath1 192.168.1.35
iwconfig ath1 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig ath1 up
vlc --fullscreen rtsp://192.168.1.17/ipcam.sdp
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager start
This is based on information I found here.
This seems to work, but the wireless networking is a bit iffy after the script exits - I might have to do the wlanconfig destroy bit again to put it into infrastructure mode.
Ad-Hoc Wireless Network Troubles
Now that I have the Edimax IP Camera working I want it to connect to my Toshiba NB100 netbook computer as simply as possible - the idea is to use it when we are away on holiday so I don't want to have to set up a whole network with an access point etc. Instead I just want to set up an ad-hoc network between the computer and the IP Camera.
According to the instructions this should be easy - I tell the IP Camera to connect to an ad-hoc network called 'bentv', and then use NetworkManager in the Ubuntu desktop of the netbook to create the ad-hoc network.
This works fine on my main laptop, but fails on the netbook.
It turns out that NetworkManager is not capable of putting the wireless card into ad-hoc mode.
The work around was to have the script to start the VLC viewer shutdown network manager and set up the network manually as follows:
This is based on information I found here.
This seems to work, but the wireless networking is a bit iffy after the script exits - I might have to do the wlanconfig destroy bit again to put it into infrastructure mode.
According to the instructions this should be easy - I tell the IP Camera to connect to an ad-hoc network called 'bentv', and then use NetworkManager in the Ubuntu desktop of the netbook to create the ad-hoc network.
This works fine on my main laptop, but fails on the netbook.
It turns out that NetworkManager is not capable of putting the wireless card into ad-hoc mode.
The work around was to have the script to start the VLC viewer shutdown network manager and set up the network manually as follows:
#!/bin/sh
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop
ifconfig ath1 down
wlanconfig ath1 destroy
wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode adhoc
iwconfig ath1 essid bentv
iwconfig ath1 channel 1
iwconfig ath1 192.168.1.35
iwconfig ath1 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig ath1 up
vlc --fullscreen rtsp://192.168.1.17/ipcam.sdp
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager start
This is based on information I found here.
This seems to work, but the wireless networking is a bit iffy after the script exits - I might have to do the wlanconfig destroy bit again to put it into infrastructure mode.
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Edimax IC-3010Wg again
I have made a bit more progress getting my Edimax IP Camera working, and detailed what I have learned at http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
The main problems are still that although I can download an MPEG4 stream using wget, neither mplayer nor vlc will play it directly, which is no good.
The other issue is that sound still does not work.....
The main problems are still that although I can download an MPEG4 stream using wget, neither mplayer nor vlc will play it directly, which is no good.
The other issue is that sound still does not work.....
Edimax IC-3010Wg again
I have made a bit more progress getting my Edimax IP Camera working, and detailed what I have learned at http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
The main problems are still that although I can download an MPEG4 stream using wget, neither mplayer nor vlc will play it directly, which is no good.
The other issue is that sound still does not work.....
The main problems are still that although I can download an MPEG4 stream using wget, neither mplayer nor vlc will play it directly, which is no good.
The other issue is that sound still does not work.....
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