HN Distilled

Essential insights from Hacker News discussions

Turning a Decommissioned iPhone into a UniFi Protect Camera

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

Here are the key themes from the Hacker News discussion:

Difficulty in Sharing Solutions and Lack of Specificity

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the original poster (OP) not detailing how they ultimately solved the technical problem of getting an old iPhone to function as a camera. This lack of specificity led to frustration and curiosity among other users.

  • "It is unfortunate that they decided to omit how they fixed the last issue they mentioned. That could've been useful knowledge for others"
  • "Honestly, I saw this and was very interested to learn how they actually solved the problem. Cool that OP did it! Bummed that they weren't willing to share how they did it."
  • "I also thought this strange to leave out the exact details and information that people would actually be interested to learn about."
  • A user named "gerdesj" directly quoted the OP: "The documentation on Github is enough, but frustratingly, the failure mode I ran into was the video just… not loading. However, I eventually got it nailed down, and now I have a new camera in Protect."
  • Another user, "Belphemur," speculated on the reason for the omission: "Might be a case of: tried so many things, no idea what fixed it."

Concerns About iPhone Battery Degradation and Safety

A prominent theme is the concern regarding the long-term use of iPhones as dedicated devices, particularly focusing on battery health, degradation, and potential safety risks like swelling or fire hazards.

  • "Disappointed to see no discussion on battery. That's what is keeping me from implementing this. My old iphones are at 2+ years battery life. i.e. at the point where they're at risk of becoming spicy pillows and I'd love to not have a lithium fire in my apartment. In that context spending 50 bucks on amazon for a camera suddenly seems sound"
  • "I had assumed ifruits would just decide nope if they can't see the battery"
  • "My layman understand is that dendrites accumulate over time so risk is incremental over use...and for phones use and time is basically same thing. Low use items I'd totally run for many more years."
  • "Can confirm that sticking an old iPhone, say, connected to power in your garage to serve as a kiosk device 24/7 will 100% result in the battery swelling up. I had it happen. Now, in my case it didn't cause any harm and I was even able to replace that 5S's battery. But tbh I would not trust an Apple device in a permanently-powered situation for this reason."
  • "Especially since Apple, in their benevolence, software-restrictions the technology of the 'only charge to 80%' option to only their newest devices (14 series and up, only) so anything older than that will be torturing its battery if left on a charger long-term."
  • "A long time ago, I used to work at a place that decided to stick iPads onto meeting room doorways to display who had the room booked (because people are the worst). These'd last 7 or 8 months before the battery puffed up enough to be noticed, or in a few cases to crack the screens. I grabbed a few power point timer switches, and set them to only over up the charger for a hour a day. Never had another battery puffing failure"
  • "I have heard the camera modules get hot and degrade as they weren't created to be always ON in smartphones?"
  • One user brought up a potential mitigation: "this is a product category ('battery health protection device'): https://chargie.org"

Debate on Battery Lifespan and Usage Factors

The discussion also includes a debate about what constitutes an "old" battery, the factors influencing battery degradation (time vs. cycles), and the real-world lifespan of iPhone batteries under different usage patterns.

  • "2+ years battery life"
  • "Is this considered old? I own countless devices with batteries older than this."
  • "Not an expert on this but my understanding is that at 2+ risk starts to increase, especially that have seen high use and fast charging."
  • "No. We have a couple hundred phones at work that are 5-9 years old. Does failure rate increase with time? Of course. Until you hit 5 years, the phone is perfectly fine."
  • "I think it's charge/discharge cycles more than time that gets to batteries. I've heard that a decent rule of thumb for LiPo batteries is that they'll drop to around 80% of 'new capacity' in around 1000 cycles. So around 3 years to drop to 80% capacity if they're fully charged/discharged daily, or around 5 years if they're only discharged to 30-40% and topped up daily. If you only charge them once every week or month (like my Kindle), the battery will probably still be fine after 20 years."
  • "I'm currently using an iPhone 13 from late 2021, so almost 4 years old. It's showing 79% Maximum Capacity in Battery Health, and I only occasionally use more then 75% of battery over a days use."
  • "Depends on how you use it, but with intensive use like 2+ charge cycles a day 7 days a week, and long times connected to charger makes 2+ years quite old."
  • "Apple itself supports using an old iPhone as a camera for Apple TV Facetime and karaoke use, so while this is a risk, it doesn't seem to be something the company is concerned about."

Appreciating and Critiquing the UniFi Ecosystem

A significant portion of the conversation centers on Ubiquiti's UniFi product line, particularly UniFi Protect for security cameras. This includes praise for its integration and features, as well as criticism regarding its vendor lock-in, support quality, and past security incidents.

  • "UniFi people are like the vegans of tech"
  • "It is really good though. Network has come a long way, and really is powerful, intuitive, and can support most advanced use cases. Protect is awesome, no cloud storage tomfoolery. AI features like license plate and facial recognition, and partner it with access and you can do some awesome integrations such as automatically open up your front gate, door, etc based on your car or face."
  • "Has they had a third party audit since a disgruntled employee did whatever they did? They had an insider threat situation a couple years back I think. I didn’t follow the story closely at the time, but I’ve supported end users and installs for Ubiquiti/Unifi stuff, and since that happened, I haven’t really been sure how much I should trust them."
  • "The joke for those who missed it: 'How do you know somebody loves Unifi?' 'Don't worry they'll tell you' Disclaimer: I do like unifi."
  • "No this is false. Vegans have a point. UniFi enthusiasts are damaged without any underlying technical or moral reasoning."
  • "UBNT has this weird market slice where their kit falls into being either dogshit with long term support or almost great with terrible support."
  • "Show me an alternative. Requirements are: flawless wi-fi, tiny managed PoE switches, networking UI that lets you document things (name ports and devices, etc), security cameras, storage/playback for security video, quick setup, zero fiddling required."
  • "I guess you would classify me as a 'damaged unifi enthusiast', while I'm just practical: this stuff works for me (has worked for the last several years). I'm open to other solutions, but they need to be more than just 'possible' and have more advantages than 'not being unifi'."
  • "UniFi Protect doesn’t support live audio or audio playback for third-party cameras. It also lacks support for people and vehicle detections."
  • "If can support detection events on 3rd party ONVIF cameras, but you have to buy a seperate ubiquiti hardware product to run the detections. Either an AI Port or an AI Key."
  • "Of course, it's vendor-locked consumer garbage ;)"

Alternatives and DIY Solutions for IP Cameras

The discussion also touches upon alternative solutions and DIY approaches for IP cameras, including using third-party software and hardware.

  • "Are you sure you want to go down this route: 'Turn device into IP Camera'? - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ip-camera-lite/id1013455241"
  • "This is likely the Github mentioned: https://github.com/p10tyr/rtsp-to-onvif ... its a proxy that takes a RTSP stream and makes it look all lovely and ONVIF (ie discoverable)."
  • "I think that Frigate has recently had a proxy or proxy handling recently added. Zoneminder would also work with this approach."
  • "Please, whatever you do, put your cameras on their own VLAN, with no access to the internet. Especially if names like Reolink (int al) are involved. I own quite a few Reos and they live on a VLAN called SEWER!"
  • "Casey, this is the most Casey thing I've ever heard, using an iPhone + some hackery when even cheap Amazon no-name PTZ cameras ($30-40 usually) natively support onvif! I'm happy it worked for you though."
  • "You could also use the ZoneMinder (open-source), it supports many video/image streams from cameras and provides detections/alerting"

Exploring Other Uses for Decommissioned iPhones

Beyond surveillance, users also express interest in other potential applications for old iPhones.

  • "Wondering if there is any way to run a webserver on old iphone?"
  • "Any list of cool uses for decommissioned iPhones?"
  • "I would be actually quite interested in using my 6S as a tv box / HDMI dongle for streaming and emulation."