The author shares insights from their experience reverse engineering the TP-Link Tapo C200 IP camera, emphasizing the value of cheap devices for learning. They highlight their process of using AI tools to aid in firmware analysis, which led to the discovery of several vulnerabilities. The Tapo C200, while stable and affordable at under 20 EUR, revealed serious flaws that affect around 25,000 devices connected to the internet. The author obtained the firmware easily through an unsecured TP-Link S3 bucket, then decrypted it using available tools that rely on keys TP-Link publishes as part of their open-source obligations. After analyzing the firmware with Ghidra, they uncovered a hardcoded private key used for SSL, allowing potential attackers to decrypt HTTPS traffic if they are on the same network as the camera. They also identified a significant security issue: a memory overflow vulnerability in the ONVIF SOAP XML parser, which can be exploited to crash the camera by sending excessive XML elements. The findings underscore the risks embedded in consumer-level IoT devices. While the author did not exploit these vulnerabilities for remote code execution, they noted that physical access could lead to easy exploitation due to the presence of debugging tools in the firmware. The use of AI throughout the process streamlined their analysis and made it easier to identify critical components and functions related to security weaknesses.