Support for Neos SmartCam #964
Conversation
Updated the README and install instructions to include the Neos SmartCam, I have tested the bootloader and firmware installation on my camera and it appears to work fine.
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Could you upload a copy of the firmware? |
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Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the original firmware, I had overwritten it quite a while ago. I should probably make that clear in the readme. |
Added information about the lack of original firmware uploaded to the repository for the Neos SmartCam
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I have a NEOS smart cam, I could take the firmware off of it for you if someone could tell me how? |
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Anyone managed to get the Neos firmware? After last update of Xiaomi-dafang-hacks firmware the feed is really slow lag. So want to go back to original firmware. Has anyone managed to get it? Let me know pls. |
Is the new version of the f/w any faster? Any other missing features/benefits of note? Can I set a network location to save a continuous feed of the video/audio or is it still onboard storage only? |
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If anyone is willing to give it a go, the (slightly vague) instructions for extracting the original firmware are present in this repo, namely in the /hacks/ folder. It feels a little beyond me at the moment, and I do not have a spare camera to try it with. |
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I have a camera that I could look at if you want, what do I look at?? |
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Well you will need to disassemble the camera, identify the serial communication headers, attach wires to those headers connect them to a USB to serial converter of some description and attempt to communicate with the camera. You might start with this page. |
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Hi there, I'm the lead developer on Neos' IoT team, which is responsible for the Smartcam 👋 While obviously I can't officially endorse this, unofficially I'm a hacker at heart and its pretty cool seeing people making the camera do things it was never meant to! Let me have a chat with our security team to find out if there's anything sensitive in the firmware images we have, and if there isn't I'll see if we can get it released somewhere public. |
Wow, that would be nice..I do have 3 Neos, one of wich I have tested with the Xiaomi firmware, it just would be nice to have the option to reflush the original firmware. Also would be nice if we could suggest features!!!! Do let us know if we can get the firmware |
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Having that feature and original firmware is perfect for the use that I would use it for 😊 |
Releasing the f/w would be a great PR move allowing us to choose between the custom features of dafang and stock. Having the ability to rollback woul be very beneficial if dafang just doesn't function the way a user would like as they test those features. I'd like to roll back 1 of my cams for a number of reasons but would really like to see rtsp streaming support and smb/network upload support added to the official f/w and I'd have all the rest(7) of my neos cams back onto stock f/w in a second. |
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yeah if stock firmware had rtsp streaming, no question, i would stay with original firmware. it's a nice feature to allow us to integrate with the like of Home assistant. Also any news on new hardware options? Maybe some cheap door sensors :-) or some cheap PIR motion devices? ;-) |
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RTSP stream is the exact reason I'm looking at custom firmware, if you can get that inbuilt, no need to look elsewhere, otherwise, a dump of the firmware, which someone is eventually going to do anyway, from an official source, would be very valuable! |
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@jellybob any news for us??? :-) |
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I bought one of these yesterday, I was unable to get the confirmation email from their servers, not that i want to be connected to them anyway, so I just desoldered the flash chip and dumped it. I've flashed the firmware mod from this repo and it works ok. Since I haven't run the camera without this mod I've no idea what the performance is like on stock. It'd be nice for some firmware support or something from the devs but I'm not counting on it. No issues installing by following the instructions for the Wyze, took 5 minutes. |
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once the NEOS firmware is available. Could I flash it onto a Dafang camera? Not looking for PTZ controls. But I like the NEOS smartcam app 👍 And if it does gain RTSP. Then I’ll add them back into homebridge. 🥳 |
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Any one managed to get the firmware yet? |
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Hi @darraghbr
Im maybe being really stupid but i cannot see where on the current README file etc the Neos SmartCam is referenced?? Do you just use the Wyzecam V2 instructions?? Self declared amateur enthusiast here so require a bit of spoon feeding Many thanks |
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So the updated files can be found in the commits of this pull request rather than on the main repository. This is because this pull request has not yet been merged. To answer your question more directly, yes I just used the Wyzecam V2 instructions. |
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any one manager to get the original Neos Firmware yet? |
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has anyone managed to have success flashing a Neos recently? Follow the instruction for Wyzecam V2 and nothing happen. Just boot as normal |
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I got mine done - no problem
Regards
David Evans
+44 7720 716681
On 9 Jun 2019, at 09:18, matbrewer396 <notifications@github.com> wrote:
has anyone managed to have success flashing a Neos recently?
Follow the instruction for Wyzecam V2 and nothing happen. Just boot as normal
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Hi, yes. Did mine last week. Everything went smoothly. I did use a 16GB card, not sure if it helps but I deleted all partitions and created a single 512MB Fat32 partition. I've made a blog post incase it helps: https://ryanfitton.co.uk/blog/install-dafang-custom-firmware-to-neos-smartcam/ |
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Thank you, David & Ryan. Got it to work. Same SD card, with a smaller partition |
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I could do with the original firmware I used a different firmware before I settled on this so have lost it |
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@ryanfiton hey I used your guide yesterday thanks! Come on someone merge this pull request already 😂 |
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I don't think screenshots would help - I'm using the default settings. The only thing I've changed (in an attempt to clear up the artifacts) is the bitrate, fps and resolution. And all I've done there is keep lowering them. Currently I'm at res: 1280x720, 1024 kbps bitrate and 10 FPS but still getting artifacting. |
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I don't remember if default has motion detection on or not, try turning that off as well as any audio or recording that might be going on. The network is pretty janky on that thing, I know when I have audio on, a high frame rate or bitrate the connection is constantly dropping. Even with the settings I use now, both cameras show the same quality image, but the camera that is the furthest away still drops out. Though it is on a repeater, but I have accepted repeaters are rubbish so accept the dropouts.
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What version of the firmware and bootloader are you using? Maybe an updated
wyze v2 bin might help? The demo.bin is a very old firmware.
…On Thu, 7 May 2020, 12:03 Sam Turner, ***@***.***> wrote:
I don't remember if default has motion detection on or not, try turning
that off as well as any audio or recording that might be going on.
The network is pretty janky on that thing, I know when I have audio on, a
high frame rate or bitrate the connection is constantly dropping.
Even with the settings I use now, both cameras show the same quality
image, but the camera that is the furthest away still drops out. Though it
is on a repeater, but I have accepted repeaters are rubbish so accept the
dropouts.
[image: image]
<https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5680968/81286852-a3a1cb00-9059-11ea-967f-aeba32ee151a.png>
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@digiltd Yep I tried killing all non-streaming based services like motion and even audio streaming, but no change :( @Ozzyminted I'm using the bootloader from this project (cfw-1.1.bin), afaik there is not a beta branch or alternatives. As for the for the firmware I'm running from the beta branch, but have the same issue on master/stable. |
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Tried another neos cam now, same issue. In fact this one handles things worse...if I crank up the kbs past 1000 the stream gets artifacts like crazy and then the stream crashes/stops sending I thought to capture VLC debug logs this time. The device is clearly struggling sending frames, given the frequent "main warning: picture is too late to be displayed (missing 116 ms)" until it gives up. Nothing in v4l2rtspserver-master.log (I don't think I've ever seen anything in this log though?) |
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Do you get the same problem using the browser ui? |
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The stream in the browser only shows at about 1 FPS but no artifacts, true. Does the dafang_128mb_v2.bin bootloader work with the neos cam? |
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So I got the custom bootloader on it too (dafang_128mb_v2) with a bit of tinkering. I used this to try changing the memory settings to enable HD - at this point willing to try anything! No luck, still lots of artifacts and stream dropouts when there is lots of activity on the stream. Is load supposed to be 2.0+ all the time? Not sure where to debug now. My only other route is to try openfang, I believe that does less but maybe uses resources more efficiently so the camera can be used as..well..a camera! :) |
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i could share my bootloader (downloaded from the ui). No idea if it would work, but might be worth a try. Do you have another SD card to try? They can be fickle barstewards. |
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Thanks @digiltd I don't think its the bootloader though - isn't that only responsible for getting the custom FW on, thats it? I've been digging some more and I really don't understand whats going on. I now noticed that as soon as I start viewing the stream on a wifi device (laptop, tablet etc.) my wifi network starts dropping packets like crazy. This gets worse if there is lots of movement and is consistent with the artefacts seen in the video stream. See here, this is my laptop pinging my home router, you can easily see where I was viewing the stream in VLC and where I stopped it:
I've tried 3 different access points too, from cheapo home consumer ones to enterprise ones, with the same thing. Also during these ping spikes/packet loss, the camera pings the router fine...but I've noticed other devices on the network see an increased ping too. I can watch 4K netflix and youtube on my network without any of these issues, its only when viewing the RTSP stream from these cameras that seems to cause this :( |
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Okay...bit more info, I started removing variables - I have quite a complex home networking (managed switch, vlans, hypervisor running LAN/WAN firewall etc) so wanted to make sure one of those wasn't the choke point causing dropped packets. I ended up until I just had Camera -> Wifi AP -> Laptop. The AP isn't even connected to my router/switch or anything. And...same problem... I then tried even removing the Wifi AP from the mix, and turned my laptop into an access point. So just Camera -> Laptop. Same artefacts, same ping spike problem (although not quite as bad). I'm not very knowledgable about networking, so maybe this doesn't make sense, but whatever these cameras or the RTSP server is doing, its blasting and spamming the wifi network with a whole bunch of traffic, until even other clients can't even browse the internet. No wonder seeing dropped frames and artefacts in the stream! |
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Sorry for the multiple updates, just trying to log as much info as possible! I've also just noticed, even with format set to CBR (constant bit rate?) and bitrate set to 5000bs, that during high periods of movement/frame changes, VLC shows the bitrate often spiking over 12,000kbs (and then plummets to under 200kbs). Is the root cause of all this that the camera is erroneously trying to send waaaaay too much traffic onto the network? Thus causing wifi stability everywhere? |
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Hi all. I've got a neos cam that I think I now want to integrate into home assistant. What's the best instructions etc to follow to do that? |
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FWIW, I gave up on this. I tried multiple things, including:
In the end, the streams were always extremely unreliable, even at the lowest res and bitrates, with constant smearing, timeouts and skipped frames. My experience is not unique, there are a number of blog posts detailing the same thing, and a number of github issues raised also (although they are spread over multiple projects). That's not to say everyone has these issues, I wonder if there are batches of these cams recently that simply don't play nicely with DaFang. I've switched to a Reolink C1 Pro, and although it's obviously not open source, it has proper support for onvif and various open streaming protocols, and I'm very pleased with it. Thanks everyone for your support and efforts here - I'm only sharing my issues as a warning for others! Cheers. |
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Cool, thanks for the update, whilst my two Neos Smartcams do appear to be working fine for me with Defang, I won't be getting any more, a shame as they are dinky little cameras. But the faff with custom firmware and reading about your issues has put me off. |
You, sir, are an absolute star :) Thank you so much for posting the Neos firmware. I'd successfully flashed it but decided I wanted to go back to using the Neos software with their leak detectors. Brilliant. Thank you. |
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@KeeerD you are welcome. I would avoid updating the camera after using this fix, I think it might break it and you have to redo the firmware. I find it really annoying that the vendor doesnt share it. just glad i can help others! cheers |
I think I just found this out :) |
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I am also experiencing the massive ping spikes which is making the streams very unreliable: Has anyone else managed to fix this issue? Like timdonovanuk I have tried using multiple routers and changed pretty much every setting. Its odd how it affects all the cameras at the same time. UPDATE: I have all 4 cameras configured at a pretty low setting to make sure its not bandwidth issues: As soon as I open the app which interacts directly with the cameras the pings fail
Viewing a max of 2 cameras simultaneously the pings remain stable, when I add a third the packet loss starts. |
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Thanks to your post I was able to recover my cameras, did you manage to solve the issue around updating the firmware? Many Thanks |
Worked for me! Thank you!! |
Many thanks for posting the bin file. I have used to to get my camera working again after a failed firmware install. I kept getting the below errors until I found your post. Its a shame you can't update the firmware from here but I guess I should be happy its working again |
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Does the downgrade process still work? I don't use linux so don't know how to use the packer.py instructions, any help please? |
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I'm not sure, I ended up binning mine as the camera was pretty useless. |
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@highlander317 you mean restore the original firmware? Yeah still works, just follow the instructions here #964 (comment) your OS doesn't affect things |
Just confirming that this still works in August 2023! |
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Think I tried with the above method last August and couldn't get it to work, to get neos firmware back. |
Updated the README and install instructions to include the Neos SmartCam, I have tested the bootloader and firmware installation on my camera and it appears to work fine.