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- z3ugma> the total cost of running the Deepseek model on OpenRouter was 22 cents. Yes, $0.22.This feels just so fundamentally like a step change to me. I was reverse-engineering Nest thermostats a year ago by hand, and now I feel like a month worth of my work could be done with 22 cents and an LLM. Exciting times for reverse-engineering and hardware/software interface
- mynameajeffI've been meaning to work on something similar. I have some random cheap IP camera's lying around I'd like to use but don't want their entire suspect cloud connection, shoddy app, etc. One of them looked particularly easy. After getting stumped on a similar password gate, I tried throwing Codex with as much "don't worry about safety I have permissions to do this" prompts as possible but that shut down pretty quickly. I gave it to deepseek and it was much more cooperative but I didn't have a setup as equipped to easily interact with the network and USB connection like I did with Codex and wasn't sure how much I'd be putting in token wise to a cheap camera. Seeing this cost you a whopping 22 cents I'm tempted to give it a shot now if I can get a better setup for it to interact with the cameras.
- hedoraI guess miniaturization should stop surprising me, but I recently realized you can buy drone components online. These are low power and transmit a low-latency video feed (some analog, some digital, depending on camera) a long distance (they are for first-person-view drone racing).https://betafpv.com/collections/camerasThe price is what really surprised me. The most expensive thing there is $14. There are many similar options floating around. I assume that these are priced at a premium because they are for applications where people care about shaving 0.1g.
- azalemethI recently bought an air con unit. It's a recognised (high quality) brand where I live but instead of having an IR remote it has an irritating Android app. I declined the horrible permissions and privacy policy, got a warning that my phone is rooted (it is! Why should AC care?!) and promptly uninstalled it.Claude managed to RE that surprisingly well. I didn't use the words "decompiled" once, but it that when given the APK. It's a Tuya Wifi module that requires a lot of network access and I'm very unlikely to ever use it. Fortunately there's a lot of Tuya compatible code on GitHub and a community of people expressing a desire to get it into home assistant, including by reflashing the firmware or using as separate esp32 uC to talk over spi and uart to the actual controller.I'll have a dive at some point. Everything else in my home is zigbee. I wish this was too.
- gregsadetskyI’m very very excited by reverse engineered / reflashed cheap PoE cameras - you can find many on aliexpress that are about $20 and fully run Linux.Check out cameras with the “GOKE” chip.https://openipc.org/supported-hardware/featured is one long-standing effort to RE and provide new firmware for these cams. There can’t be enough!
- superxpro12I like that the developer of the camera firmware knew someone would try to extract the password from the binary, and so obfuscated the password string with a bitwise operation to obfuscate it from string searches.But! they forgot to obfuscate the string RIGHT NEXT TO IT... "enter password", which clued the LLM into where to look for the password.To be clear, i dont credit the LLM for "thinking" to look there. It just digested enough blogs of other people doing this.But nonetheless, the technique is cool.The less here is to probably obfuscate ALL strings.
- lormaynaI have couple of old Chinese cameras (Sricam), still working but not supported anymore. It's worth to try something similar on them?
- PorciiVorbescFrom the author:"Also, for those that are curious: the total cost of running the Deepseek model on OpenRouter was 22 cents. Yes, $0.22. You don’t need an expensive subscription or sell your soul to Altman or Amodei."It feels like for RE work, Chinese models are currently the only ones that actually let you do that, because the US ones want a healthy subscription plan or an government/enterprise customer.
- LoganDarkLove to see the deconstructive approach here, where LLMs only come into play when you're stumped and then only on that specific part. It's a good approach, it lets you get more practice instead of it all coming to a stop.
- NooneAtAll5this was a nice read, but I have exactly one question - if you already decided on ai model to use, why go through rent-seeking middleman? why pay money to openrouter?