Skip to main content

Adventures in CheapML - GarageCam

· 2 min read
Nick Lange
Nick Lange
Founder/CEO at 5L Labs

With Scrypted / Thingino up and stable, the next goal is to replace my janky garage door sensor with a camera-based sensor. With some luck, I can extend this to every camera in the house cheaper and more accurately than Frigate, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

  1. What I have:

    • Wyze Cam v3
    • Scrypted
    • Thingino
    • HomeKit
    • RPi 4 that isn't melting

  2. What I need:

    • A way to detect when the garage door is open or closed
    • A way to update MQTT with the state of the garage door
    • A way to update MQTT with the state of the car

So far: The initial Python script I "vibe coded" was, to put it mildly, very hacky. It used the ONVIF Snapshot protocol to capture a frame every 60 seconds from the camera. While it technically worked with opencv-python and paho-mqtt for a few days, it was brittle and prone to memory leaks on the RPi 4.

The real lesson here was in the data handling—capturing snapshots is easy, but making a reliable sensor out of them required a more robust architecture. This prototype was eventually rewritten to use a more stable event-driven model, which I'll cover in the follow-up post.

OE