There could be many ways, you build those sorts of things into your hardware for development and debugging.
Remember, it used to be a USB interface camera, not WiFi. They only made that switch way after the campaign ended.
Remember, they have already claimed they are getting thermal images out of their supposed camera. Any excuse about not being able to show an image because WiFi is not working is therefore complete bullshit. There is absolutely no doubt about this based on what they have said. So they have either been lying, or are full of crap, there is no third option.
Don't get me wrong - I think at best, the project has huge problems. I gather no-one know the status of the sensor and lens.
The camera will be a WiFi access point, so I gather that means to use the camera at home, you have to disconnect from your home WiFi and connect to the camera. They you forget you are not connected to your WiFi you start and start watching a whole lot of movies on your phone all charged to your phone account's data plan.
If the WiFi has no security, perhaps it is possible to spoof the camera's WiFi and get someones phone to connect to another rogue access point.
If USB is too hard to get working across all cameras, Bluetooth would have been the right solution even if it meant reducing the video to 1 frame/sec which would be just as useful, but not as funky. Bit late now, since they have promised 30 fps.
I didn't see any reference to getting images out of the camera sensor yet - I did see a vague statement like this:
" Image quality is of utmost importance to us and much of that work is on the hardware side."
"Thermal imaging is tricky, and we want to get it right for every camera we build, so we keep testing and redesigning and perfecting, I think that we’re nearly there though."
" a working camera will be unveiled in early May, and you will see working videos of our camera well in advance of that." Hmmmmm
All the posted IR images and videos was a bit misleading - I am sure some people would have thought they were taken with the Mu Optics camera instead of something that probably costs over 20 times more.
I would definitely agree that the camera testing and the phone connectivity testing should have been in prototyping before the fund raising. Now they are committed to delivering about 1800 cameras and they are still trying to work out how to do it. I think they are in trouble. I gather there has been no tooling for the case yet. With the changes in chipsets, they would have to design, order and build new test/prototyping boards before the next round of tests.
Probably an excellent case study in what not to do if you ever want to start a fund raising project with a chance of a successful outcome.
I definitely wont do it this way when I start my IC Printer crowd-sourcing project. I will have the Android and iPhone apps with the big "PRINT IC" button completely working before I start the funding campaign.