Thingino

Thingino is an open-source firmware for Ingenic based IP cameras. This is a good alternative firmware for the Wyze Cam (v2, v3, but not the v4) as it has RTSP support with an up-to-date kernel/OS.

Installation

Josh at WL Tech Blog has made Thingino installers for all the supported cameras available from his GitHub repo:

• https://github.com/wltechblog/thingino-installers

Simply find the installer for your camera and follow the instructions provided.

Installation using Cloner

If you 'brick' your T31 based camera through a bad update, you can use the Ingenic USB Cloner tool to reflash the firmware. More information at https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki/Ingenic-USB-Cloner

In short, the cloner tool can re-flash the flash memory without needing the device to boot into an operating system. This works only if you put the T31 SoC into USB-boot mode (think of it like DFU mode for IOS) which happens if the flash memory isn't bootable. The simplest way to achive this is to open the camera and to short out the flash memory chip on power up to render it unreadable by the SoC.

Steps to use cloner:

1. Download cloner for Windows at: https://github.com/gtxaspec/ingenic-cloner-profiles/releases/download/legacy/cloner-2.5.43-windows_thingino.7z
2. Open the camera and locate the flash chip. This is typically an 8 pin chip labelled something like 25Q64 or 25Q128. Read the thingino-firmware wiki linked above for pictures. You need to short out pins 5+6 (pins on opposite corner of where there is an embossed dot on the chip)
3. Plug the camera to your PC while shorting the pins and then release the short.
4. If this is working, you should see a new device in device manager
5. Run the cloner utility
6. To flash a new firmware, select t31x_sfc_nor_writer_full.cfg, under Policy, select full_image, SFC_NOR at offset 0x0 with the full thingino firmware file as the attribute.

Wyze cam v3

Installation on the Wyze Cam v3 is simple: You simply need to copy a few files to your SD card and then reboot the camera. You don't even need to touch it if you already have wz_mini_hacks installed as you just need to copy the files via SSH and reboot.

1. Download the latest installer files from https://github.com/wltechblog/thingino-installers/tree/main/wyze-cam-3
2. Extract the files and then upload it to the SD card. if you're using wz_mini_hacks with SSH enabled, you can just copy it via SSH:

   $ for i in  factory_t31_ZMC6tiIDQN  thingino-wyze_cam3_t31al_gc2053_atbm6031.bin  thingino-wyze_cam3_t31x_gc2053_atbm6031.bin  thingino-wyze_cam3_t31x_gc2053_rtl8189ftv.bin ; do cat "$i"  | ssh root@wyze-camera "cat - > /media/mmc/$i" ; done
   

3. Reboot the camera and wait 2-3 minutes.
4. You should see a wireless access point show up once this is done named "THINGINO-XXXX". Connect to it and then go to http://172.16.0.1/ to complete the setup. After you enter your password/wifi settings, you will see the MAC address of the device.

Frigate integration

Getting Thingino and Frigate with nvidia hardware acceleration seems to be a little tempermental when configured with a specific combination of configuration settings that leads to the detection and recording processes to eventually misbehave and crash. When this misbehavior happens, ffmpeg uses 100% GPU and rapidly eats up as much system memory as it can get before OOM kills it. While this happens, the preview shows corrupt frames like this:

Frigate + nvidia acceleration + Thingino misbehaving which causes frames to scramble until ffmpeg crashes.

A few things that I had to do to make it work:

1. If you use the sub stream, you shouldn't use hwaccel_args : preset-nvidia or else ffmpeg goes off the rails and then crashes
2. If you want to use hwaccel_args: preset-nvidia, then don't use the sub stream as an input. You can still use it as a live stream.

This seems to work for me:

garage:
    ffmpeg:
      hwaccel_args: preset-nvidia
      output_args:
        record: preset-record-generic-audio-aac
      inputs:
        - path: rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/wyze-garage?timeout=30
          input_args: preset-rtsp-restream
          roles:
            - record
            - detect
            - audio
    live:
      stream_name: wyze-garage_sub
go2rtc:
  streams:
    wyze-garage:
       - rtsp://thingino:thingino@ip:554/ch0#timeout=30
    wyze-garage_sub:
       - rtsp://thingino:thingino@ip:554/ch1#timeout=30

  webrtc:
    candidates:
      - 10.1.2.30:8555
      - stun:8555