I know I'm not the only one. What's the thing you missed that still bothers you? Fish acting weird for days before you noticed? Algae taking over while you were busy? A heater failure you caught too late?
Genuinely curious what the most painful blind spots are in this hobby. The stuff where you think "if someone had just told me on day one..."
Working on a consumer hardware product built around a WiFi camera with our own backend. The camera needs to stream only to our servers. No vendor cloud, no P2P, no mandatory app.
Been talking to suppliers on Alibaba and it's been rough. Most are resellers pushing Tuya / iCSee / V380-based cameras that are cloud-locked by design. The actual manufacturers either won't do custom firmware or want huge MOQs.
Requirements are standard otherwise: 4MP+, 2.4GHz WiFi, FCC certified or willing to certify, white label, starting 100-500 units.
Has anyone here actually gotten custom firmware from a Shenzhen camera ODM at low volume? Who did you work with and what did the NRE look like? Also open to being told my expectations are off.