more hardware hacking fun

As if I needed another project. I purchased a neat device from ebay, seemingly the only place to buy these devices in the US without paying huge $$$ for it, called the ipKamera 9100a. It's a smallish box with an ethernet port, 4 video inputs and a microphone input on it. it has a really crappy software interface you access via a web browser (requires activeX for full control and configuration) and after dinking a bit, and using a hex editor to start looking around inside the firmware upgrade located on the CDrom that came with it.... discovered it runs my beloved linux! hmmm, this means that taking it a part and digging in it's creamy nugat center is in order. Discovery of a rs232 header and that I can see the bootloader and linux kernel booting as well as gaining shell access told me that this thing was very VERY hackable. so I donned my "I work for a big company bla bla bla" hat and was able to get my hands on a seemingly incomplete SDK for the device with the items for creating the raw romfs file system as well as assembling firmware upgrade files for the unit to be loaded through either the web interface or through the bootloader JTAG interface you have access to during boot.

The hardware is neat, and for $99.00 it's a nice little platform to play with. A good friend of mine and I are currently reverse engineering it heavily. (tidbit: the video inputs are on the USB bus and identified as usb devices!) and will be sharing some fun information about this device.

I want to modify it to generate seperate jpg fiels of each video input that I can grab and put on my server every 5 minutes, and set up the mic in to be an icecast stream.

other neat things are possible by simply adding to it's image... or we hope. need more info about the processor (for cross compiling)