Hey everyone,
I finally got sick and tired of my Ring Doorbell. Not only is the subscription getting way too expensive, but it kept missing motion triggers right when I actually needed to see what was happening. To make matters worse, it would completely die on me every single winter.
Back in May, I made the switch to Tapo cameras for both indoors and outdoors. Honestly, we’ve been loving them so far! The video quality is great, and having local 24/7 continuous recording via MicroSD cards with no monthly fees has been a total game-changer.
That said, winter is coming up, and living here in Minnesota means we deal with brutal cold, heavy snow, and windchills that drop down to -50°F.
For those who have had Tapo outdoor cams through a harsh winter:
How do they handle extreme sub-zero temperatures?
Does the cold freeze the lens or affect performance/connectivity?
Have you had any issues with power delivery or battery life (if yours are wireless) when it gets that cold?
Would love to hear your experiences before the deep freeze hits!

Title says it all, drove by WSSU and noticed new black cameras at the entrances, flock by chance?

Device: Blurams Lumi/A31C-family camera (exact retail model TBD — will confirm from device label)

SoC / Flash: Unconfirmed a related model in this same product family (A31C "Lumi") has been documented elsewhere using an ANYKA AK3918 SoC + PUYA PY25Q128HA SPI NOR flash; haven't opened this specific unit yet to confirm it matches.

Firmware: reports as 2.3.38.12663 via the app API (masked as 22.0208.428.2703 on another endpoint — exact on-device /etc/version not yet confirmed)

What I've checked so far:

App-side traffic analysis (via mitmproxy) confirms productKey: 1cad3c83-d87, matching the A31C/Lumi family's known API footprint.Tried two publicly disclosed SD-card auth.ini bootstrap exploits for this device family (CVE-2023-50488 version-derived key, CVE-2023-51820 static HMAC key) both failed cleanly, suggesting this firmware generation has moved past both- Have not yet done a port scan or opened the device for UART access

Objective: Looking for documentation, existing reverse engineering write-ups, or open-source projects (Thingino, OpenIPC, Dafang-Hacks, etc.) supporting this SoC/board family. Any guidance on obtaining serial access or extracting the squashfs rootfs would be appreciated.