Most of my AI usage at work is asking it to explain how arcane, poorly documented codebases whose authors left the company long ago are architected, and it's been shockingly good at it so far.

Check if they have RTSP video streams. Even the cheapest ones usually do, labeled something like "LAN view". Unless you have rare cameras, RTSP is probably already documented on some forum and you can bypass the debugging entirely.

With open RTSP streams, you can just treat them as dumb cameras. Keep them in an isolated network segment and use some recording software to capture their picture.

The cheap cameras you are seeing produce an NTSC signal that _barely_ usable. I will frequently hit 'invisible' twigs because they are below the resolving power of the camera->transmission->receiving pipeline. Most FPV race tracks have high contrast or illuminated gates to combat this.

(Also, you should buy a tinywhoop, most fun you can have sitting down)

The cheap ones use very simply analog transmission techniques to send a video image. The quality is just enough to see where you’re flying the drone, but it’s much less than you would expect from a security camera.

There are digital options available but once you price the digital transmitter and receiver it’s going to be in the hundreds of dollars, not low tens. Amazing that it’s as cheap as it is, but there’s still a price.

The parts you linked are just cameras, not analog transmitters. It’s a cheap camera sensor with just enough circuitry to get a low res analog signal out.

I bought a cheap 'Noorio' camera based on the Ingenic T41 chipset (Amazon [link](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C8J39JHH)) a while back and it turns out that these have an AI accelerator.

I did a bit of reverse engineering to figure out how the chipset works. Here's a write-up in case this is something you're in to: https://github.com/inoop/t41-pluto

As someone who's written firmware in a corporate environment, I doubt they forgot. We had a security requirement that mandated certain fields be obfuscated. It was a pain in the ass and completely useless given the nature of the device the firmware lived on and the nature of the firmware itself. So we did the bare minimum to pass the stupid scanner someone decided was necessary 10 years ago.

This smells like a similar situation, it's not like they don't have enough horsepower for MD5.

Author here, good question! I actually didn’t know what model I wanted to use; I had a general idea of “let’s try a Chinese model instead” but didn’t know how Deepseek, Qwen, or any of the other models compared against each other. Deepseek was just the first one I tried.

If I knew from the start which model I would land on I probably would’ve paid for access on their API. But the nice thing with reseller platforms is that I can quickly try out different models for a slight fee added on top, and I think that’s pretty nice given that I don’t know what model is better at any given moment, and because good new models come out all the time from all the different providers.

Well, they clearly already made the mistake once of investing in a particular provider (and then needing to apply for refund), so why not go to openrouter where your credit balance can be taken to whatever provider you want at any time? That's future-proofing, not indecision.

In particular, the LLM inset/tip boxes with the robot emoji are a nice presentation element. It’s reassuring to the reader that the main blog is probably not bot written, and serves to separate the responses in a clean way. It’s wild that we even have to discuss this, but here we are.

I agree, he really seemed to use it mainly to help stay on task, and be forced into unproductive rabbit holes. Great example is the function that turned out to be a float to int conversion; that has nothing really to do with what he is attempting to solve, and would be disheartening to use a bunch of effort only to find it wasted on such a mundane function.

OpenAI Daybreak Blue is essentially a rubber stamp process for individuals, I hd no problem getting approved as Joe Rando.

I did RE of two Xiaomi cameras with Opus 5.5 with zero refusals, he even connected them to frigate and set up everything I needed for local recording. And I just used the $20 subscription that I already used for other stuff, so it was effectively free work.