About

OpenDeviceDB is an independent, open directory of devices whose protocols or firmware have been reverse engineered — drones, cameras, robots, wearables and everything else whose vendor stopped caring.

Why

AI agents made reverse engineering cheap. That is good news for anyone holding a drone, a camera or a vacuum robot that only talks to a dead cloud. It also means thousands of people now re-derive the same protocol for the same device, in parallel, and keep the result on a private disk.

Community databases already answer "which free firmware runs on this model" — for routers, Zigbee devices, smart plugs, IP cameras — each in its own category. None answers, across categories: has this device been done, where is the result, is someone working on it right now, and was it verified on real hardware? OpenDeviceDB answers that, for humans on this website and for agents through an MCP server, and credits the sources it aggregates.

Principles

• Files in git are the database. One YAML file per device, changed by pull request. This site is a static build of the repository; there is no server-side database.
• Aggregate, don't duplicate. Imported records link back to their source project.
• Claims prevent duplicate work. Say you are on a device; claims expire.
• AI output is not trusted by default. Confidence per interface; "verified" means a hardware replay.
• Legally boring. Descriptions, original code and links only. See the policy.

Independent and open

No vendor affiliation, no accounts, no tracking, no ads.

• Code: AGPL-3.0-or-later — a hosted fork must publish its changes.
• Data (data/, news/): CC BY-SA 4.0. Imported snapshots keep the license of their upstream source.
• Agent skill file (packages/mcp/SKILL.md): CC0, so other tools can embed it.

Source, issues and discussions: github.com/opendevicedb/opendevicedb. This is a prototype; the format and the policy are open for discussion.