The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • Xiaomi Dafang Hacks: Hostname for OSD and Filename

    The config/hostname.conf file (found under /system/sdcard/when the camera is running) file defines the camera’s name:

    Cam4

    That file overrides the contents of the usual etc/hostname.conf file, somewhat to my surprise, which remains the default Ingenic-uc1_1.

    The bin/hostname utility returns the hostname:

    [root@Cam4 ~]# which hostname
/bin/hostname
[root@Cam4 ~]# hostname
Cam4

    You can automagically get the hostname in the on-screen display by modifying the OSD formatting variable in config/osd.conf:

    OSD="$(/bin/hostname) %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

    Which works because the main OSD script sources the config file to set the variable:

    Xiaomi Dafang - 15-04-2019_13.26.18
    Xiaomi Dafang – 15-04-2019_13.26.18

    It’s also helpful (at least for my purposes) to add the hostname to the image filenames. A one-line tweak in the scripts/detectionOn.sh script does the trick:

    snapshot_filename=$(/bin/hostname)_$(date "$snapshot_pattern")

    Which produces names along these lines:

    -rwxr-xr-x  1 ed   root 246K Apr 23  2019 Cam4_2019-04-23_17.51.02.jpg*

    Having source code makes simple changes like this … simple!