Show HN: OpenPetCam – a self-hosted pet camera that goes looking for your dog

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.