Come to our Discord for support, we have people using Thingino with HomeKit.

Thanks for the invite, but I find Discord appalling to use. Do you have a normal web forum I can search?

You cannot brick these that easily. Come to the support channel on Discord and we'll teach you how to revive it.

Thingino is a replacement of the stock firmware. But you obviously lose the ability to use vendor's cloud. Because if you still want to use the subscription service, why would you need to replace the stock firmware?

A typical camera has a certain functionality: remote monitoring, alerting on events, etc.

How would I, a random user, go about getting this functionality with Thingino?

The cheapest supported camera, aside from a given you as a gift, is Jooan A2R from Temu. It is like $3 per piece, brand new. It is a nice little pan/tilt model with a low-end 720p sensor. But it is fast, nice looking, snappy and dirt cheap.

I'm seeing $9.66 on Temu. The description update on this video explains that it's due to tariffs (is it cheaper outside the US?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfeA8wOEe34

The price fluctuates for sure. I bought 9 of these cams and my average price was right at $4... but now I'm seeing them closer to $10 and i can't recommend them over the Cinnado which you can often get for $10.

Hey, Openmiko is a nice project. With your baggage of knowledge, I would love to see you contributing to Thingino as well. While we still depend on binary blobs from the manufacturer SDK, there is a work on alternatives to replace what is replaceable with open stack. Join the team, have fun.