I wanted a camera for our dog that didn't stream my living room through a vendor's cloud, and that could answer "where is she?" without me steering a joystick. OpenPetCam is what came out of that.
The camera is a cheap pan/tilt model reflashed with Thingino (open firmware). It dials out over WireGuard to a $5 VPS, so nothing is open on the home network. The server relays WebRTC to your phone, records a rolling 6 hours, and runs the detection.
The part I find interesting is the "is that really her?" problem. YOLOX-nano happily calls a plush toy a dog, so every box goes through a second model, a MobileNetV2 fine-tuned on your own camera's crops. The cut-off is set from the weakest photo of your pet rather than a fixed 0.5: on held-out days a fixed 0.5 let 12 of 25 night lookalikes through, and this rule let none through. A search only says "found her" when 2 of 4 still frames agree. Box plus check is 37 ms on the $5 box, and the whole thing idles at about 5% of one core.
When she's out of view it sweeps the room (saved views first, then the pan rows) and stops on her. There's also an optional agent: tap "Something wrong?" in the app, and Claude Code on your laptop reads the report and the video around it, writes a fix with a test, and ships it only if the tests and a held-out replay pass.
Honest limits: tested on one camera model so far, the setup assumes you can run a VPS, and when she lies right under the camera with her head out of frame the detector still misses her. I'd love to hear from people with other Thingino cameras.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50360077
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