Write custom firmware to run old IP cameras locally in Home Assistant

The poster had two cheap cameras gathering dust, a Xiaomi Mi 360 and a Reolink E1 Zoom, and disliked the vendor apps, the setup, the audio and the lag on pan and tilt. They set out to write their own firmware for both. After commenters asked, they said the code was written by Claude and their agents, and Claude is listed as a contributor on the public repo. To get in, they rooted the Reolink by repacking the stock firmware image with an SSH service and their own public key, then uploading it through the camera's web page. The new firmware streams over RTSP via go2rtc and announces itself to Home Assistant through MQTT discovery.

Both cameras now run the replacement firmware with working two-way audio, pan and tilt that the poster calls responsive, and hardware settings the vendor app never exposed. Video and audio go to a Synology box rather than an SD card. The vendor's on-camera person and motion detection models have not been ported yet. The poster published the code and per-device notes.

Several commenters pointed out that Reolink cameras already work locally with Home Assistant, so the gain there is control, not privacy. Others questioned whether AI-written firmware is safe to run on a network device. The Reolink firmware had only CRC and hardware ID checks, no signing; other models may not be so open. The coding tool around Claude was not named.