This was originally posted to reddit Here but I am archiving the post here for posterity and self-reliance.

A long time ago we had IRC integrated into our server so offline people could chat, but with IRC becoming less used, we wanted to switch to something Discord-like which could enable voice chat. My preference is for self-hosted, open-source software where I control the data and service, so my target platform was Mumble. The result is pretty great; I have a easy mumble web client users can hang out in and talk with the server when they're offline, I have a phone app which receives notifications and does text to speech so with my headset I can be notified if a new user joins or if someone dies (this is all configurable). Users can choose to voice chat as well to collab on projects.

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This was originally posted to Reddit but I am re-posting it here for preservation and self-reliance:

We all watch Little Baby Bum; it's been in and out of the top 10 most viewed Youtube channels forever now (http://www.tubefilter.com/2015/04/30/top-100-most-viewed-youtube-channels-worldwide-march-2015/). It's great, inoffensive, basically free, educational, high quality, etc etc. I've probably watched hundreds of hours of it myself at this point...the songs are embedded in my brain.

But one thing about the adult brain watching these videos, we notice things that are transparent to little kids. I believe I have uncovered a dark secret in the LBB Universe...

A specific family is dealing with the death of their baby, which is their third child. Family members are dealing with various levels of trauma. And while most believe this was a terrible accident...our protagonist may actually be a toddler assassin.

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So I took the camera apart and took a high-res picture of the PCB. The wifi sub-board is soldered on so I won't remove it yet to expose the ARM CPU. That being said, maybe there's a clue on here for how to mount and write to the flash memory:

I screwed up.

I finally did it, I figured out the commands to do a custom firmware, and I tried to flash it...now the camera is UNRESPONSIVE. It boots, but no network, the LED is on, can't talk to it, nada. I'm working on my backout plan now :) Hey, that's the price of hacking. Nevertheless, I've learned a TON which is worth sharing.

Below is the set of commands I used to generate my custom firmware. The original firmware is a tar.gz, which contains conprog.bin and rootfs.bin.gz, then rootfs.bin.gz unpacks into rootfs.bin which can be mounted with:

So, baby was born, meaning not much time for hacking. Hooray though! Lucas Alexander Gullo, 9/8/2014, 6 lb 9 oz, 19 inches. Hooray!

I haven't had a ton of time to work on things, but there is some progress. Motorola got back to me, though not completely. They've given me a link to a repo with their modified cambozola, which is here: https://github.com/nikhilvs/cambozola-bms I'm still waiting on the source for mjpeg-streamer, and some guidance on the parameters to make the romfs image. I contacted gpl-violations.org and they are also trying to press on the fact that the GPL should have been included since it has embedded linux

I did something kind of interesting hardware wise though. Theory is, wouldn't it be neat to be able to move the camera, say if wife wants to monitor him napping downstairs for a while? So I figured out a way to provide stop-gap portable power for the monitor, so it can be moved around. Best yet, I did it without actually modifying what comes in the box, it all taps onto the exterior. Take a look:

Basically, I got a high current portable USB battery which charges off a micro USB, then made a converter for the power brick it comes with to go to micro USB, and then built a USB to barrel plug cable. Here's my parts list:

• Intocircuit Power Castle 11200mAh Heavy Duty 5V 2A/1A Dual USB Ports External Battery Pack Charger
• CABLE USB-A TO MICRO USB-B 0.5M
• CONN JACK 1.32MM X 3.6MM
• Size H Coaxial DC Power Plug (2-Pack)

Pretty simple solder job, just cut the USB cable in half and strip the wires, bam. I've only tested it briefly, but in about 5 hours on the battery it dropped from 100%->88% so I imagine it'll run for a VERY long time.

Hopefully I'll get to dig through the source a bit more in upcoming weeks, but feel free to use these findings in your own hacking.

Related Posts:

• Improving the Motorola Blink Baby Monitor/Camera
• Improving the Motorola Blink Baby Monitor/Camera (Part 2)
• Improving the Motorola Blink Baby Monitor/Camera (Part 4)
• Improving the Motorola Blink Baby Monitor/Camera (Part 5)