China is bad-ass when it comes to cloning different vendors of all kinds.
But the quality checking and not to say the post sales follow up is pretty much absent.
So I went ahead and got me this GQD PTZ(Pan-tilt-zoom) outdoors IP camera with 3x optical zoom and hopefully some good optics and motors.
The software is usually crap, so my expectations were not too high.
Anyhow, I’ve been lookin into this now and find it decent for the price. (about $200)
Ofcourse the first thing I look for is possibilities for firmware upgrades.
The vendor is non-existent so this needs to be digged into, which actually can be a fun learning process in itself.
As far as I can see its running a Linux kernel ver. 2.6.21 and it’s got a stripped Busybox ver. 1.12.1 on top.
I am learning that Busybox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable.
For the WEB interface it seems to be running GoAhead embedded webserver, so pretty open source all over here.
Actually promising when it comes to updating and manipulating the thing.
It seems to handle low light conditions fairly well, and it’s also got IR and IR filter.
It was stated that it will do 1280×720 resolution but I don’t see that so far, so overall I would not recommend this device to anyone.
The focus function is a little sluggish.
For resolution and picture quality my Raspberry PI PTZ camera is a lot better.
I might just end up putting the PI inside of the bulb.
That Big brother is kind of huge 🙂
