I’ve been busy recovering lots of camera work. The latest is getting the Xiaoyi cameras working again. Some quick notes:
- Tawbaware.com. It has a 12Mp Sony sensor and a Ambarella A7 processor just like the GoPro Hero 4. You can actually changed the fixed focus by rotating the ring. It is set to be in focus a few feet away to infinity. You can also have it generate RAW files which a DOS utility can convert to a DNG file. You can also turn down the JPEG smoothing as well. And also turn up the video camera to 2.5Kp30 from 1080p60.
- Dashcamhack.com is the best forum on hackers working through the various settings with various firmwares available with the most current being 1.2.13.
- Wifi STA mode. This means it can join an existing Wifi network by writing a wpa_supplicant.conf file and have a watchdog.sh script kicked off from autoexec.ash
- Xiaomi_yi. This is a simple controller that runs on Mac, Linux and Windows to control your camera via it’s onboard wifi. By default, you get a wifi network with a default password `123456890` and you can run the camera with python scripts.
- autoexec.ash configurations. You can hack the thing by putting various files on the SD card. The most important is autoexec.ash which runs when you boot the action camera. The settings are all collected so for example `writel 0xC05C2C8C 0x05A00A00` will create a resolution of 2560×1440 30P and then the bit rate `writew 0xC05C1E52 0x4190` sets the bit rate to 18Mbps and if you set that address to 0x4190 you will get 30Mbps. But make sure you have a microSD card that can write that fast.
- You can also create a file so that you can telnet into a running camera.
Here are some links:
- XYC Configurator. Runs on the XiaoYi camera and auto configures the autoexec.ash
- During runtime, the SD card is mounted at `/tmp/fuse-d`
