Over the weekend I set up some outdated wyze v3 cameras with hacked firmware to enable rtsp, and was able to load the stream into frigate to do some mouse-infestation detection. This worked great, and it was with hardware I already had laying around, but now i’m in need of some more coverage and I don’t want extension cords hanging from my basement ceiling everywhere.

I thought there might be another ~$50 wifi battery camera somewhere out there that could be hacked or had native rtsp support, but my search is coming up short… seems like either people settle for cloud-polling cheap ones or they splurge on some real quality mid-range ones. Anyone know of any cheap options?

For those curious, here’s the git repo for the wyzecams i found. It’s as easy as loading a micro-sd with the firmware, giving it an ssh key, and then turning it back on. Then you can ssh into it over the network and enable things like rtsp and a bunch of other features i don’t know what to do with. It has proven to be handy, but it doesn’t support the outdoor battery-powered models.