EMPOWERING THE FANG

Xiaomi Fang is a truly incredible IP cam. It’s incredibly affordable, 1080P and comes in a very nice shell.

But what can we do with this little thing besides what Xiaomi wants us to do?

Well when I opened the package I immediately noticed the USB port it has on the back and from that moment I knew I had to find a way to use it

Unfortunately, upon further inspection, it turned out to be a power-only USB port that has been placed there to allow you to create arrays of cameras.

But we are not afraid of getting our hands dirty, are we?
So I opened the camera and discovered that the wifi card is actually connected through USB.

In a few minutes, I replaced the wifi card with a USB hub and I got a Xiaomi Fang with a fully functional USB port on the back

So now that the USB bus is accessible it’s time to add a little of brain to this cute little thing: using the Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick we will be able to accelerate deep neural network (DNN) applications and to analyze the video stream directly on the camera.

In the next blog post, I will show how to cross-compile all the libraries and to build a simple application that makes use of this amazing hardware.