Introduction
Open firmware for cheap Anyka AK3918 IP cameras, written in Rust and run from the SD card.
Kamoder replaces the vendor app on Anyka AK3918 cameras with a small, auditable stack written in Rust. It runs from the SD card, talks to no cloud, and exposes standard protocols — SSH, a web admin UI, ONVIF, RTSP and Prometheus metrics — so the camera works with your own NVR or Home Assistant instead of a phone app.
It grew out of the shell/C SD-card hack for the AK3918EV200, and now targets the newer AK3918AV100 as well.
Work in progress
On the AV100 the network, admin and lighting stack is verified on hardware, but live video is not yet available: RTSP streams a test clip until the new encoder path lands. See Cameras for the exact status of each feature.
Why
Private by default
The vendor app phones home and pairs through a cloud account. Kamoder never starts it, and nothing leaves your network unless you configure it.
Standard protocols
ONVIF Profile S (device, media, PTZ, imaging), RTSP with Digest auth, SSH on port 2222 and a JSON API behind the web UI.
Stays online
A Wi-Fi reconciler with rollback to the last good network and a recovery ladder that reloads the driver or power-cycles the USB radio when it wedges.
Fits 32 MB of RAM
One supervisor, a handful of small services and no interpreter. Every binary is cross-compiled for the ARM926EJ-S and uClibc.
Signed releases
Every release is built in GitHub Actions and signed with Sigstore, with a build-provenance attestation you can verify offline.
Reversible
Everything lives on the SD card. The optional autostart patch changes one file in flash and ships with a verified rollback.
Where to go next
Getting started
Flash a card from a release and bring the camera up.
Architecture
How boot, supervision and the services fit together.
Cameras
Tested hardware and the feature matrix.
Verify a release
Check Sigstore signatures and provenance.
License and credits
Kamoder is licensed under the GPL-3.0-or-later. It stands on the work of Gerge's Anyka hacking journey, helloworld-spec/qiwen (Anyka SDK and toolchain), ricardojlrufino/anyka_v380ipcam_experiments, kuhnchris/IOT-ANYKA-PTZdaemon and MuhammedKalkan/Anyka-Camera-Firmware.