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The Vivitar IPC on the outside is nothing to write home about. It's a fairly standard IP Camera situation. Its got it's camera sensor in the middle surrounded by a ring that contains a status LED on top and two IR LEDs below. On the left side of the camera is a Micro USB port so the camera can get power, and right above it is a microSD card slot capable of taking microSD cards up to 32GB in size. Theres also a small hole for a microphone as well. On the rear you have nothing special, just the cameras built in stand (which is magnetic by the way) and the holes for the built in speaker. It's a fairly standard cloud based IP camera and I mean, what can you expect for a camera you can get for $39.99 (or $59.99 for a 2-pack on Amazon... This is not an ad. Just a observation). There are some strange oddities though that are different between the IPC-113 and the IPC-113v2 I have, and... They aren't hardware related. But I will note those down the line.

The construction of the camera is actually pretty sturdy and the magnetic base on the camera is actually pretty strong. You can even permanently mount these cameras but I'm now just rambling on. Now for the goods

The Inside

Opening the camera was fairly easy. Just remove a few phillips head screws and pop it open. You will want to be careful if you do this as you could accidently rip the wire for the speaker out, something I unfortunatley found out. Anyways! Inside the camera you will find a small PCB with the main guts of it. Getting sidetracked for a second, it's really incredible how simple IP cameras have gotten, most of the power in this entire camera is done on a single chip. Back on topic, you will notice a few chips here and there and here's what they are!

• Anyka AK3918 IP Camera SoC - ARM926EJ-S based with 64MB of RAM
• XMC QH64AH16 SPI Flash Chip - 64Mbit in size*
• Realtek 8189FTV WiFi Module - Simple WiFi Module that is in a LOT of IoT devices

It's a simple board but it does quite a bit! But let's focus on something rather interesting. Those four little holes, could it be?

It most likely is! UART! This actually isn't too surprising given that apparently exposed UART pads like this are a fairly common sight on cheaper IoT devices. But the main question is do they work? For right now the simple answer is I don't know. But it is something to note for later when I go poking around at it! And trust me, I will go poking around at it at some point. Anyways, the main thing for me right now is to figure out the pinout for this SPI Flash Chip. Now you might be thinking "oh it can't be that hard!" but the problem is. I can't find the datasheet for this specific chip. It's kind of a mystery to me how it's laid out and I don't want to go making assumptions based off of other SPI Flash chips from the same manufacturer.

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