Video

The house I’m in has an extensive Reolink camera system, inside and outside. We’re keeping an eye on three doggies as they move between those spaces. Reolink’s desktop app didn’t automatically switch to the cameras with activity, and I found it a bit crashy in my use. I wanted the views to follow wherever the dogs were hanging out without having to keep switching cameras myself.

So I built two sister apps with the assistance of Codex:

• Guard Dog, a Kotlin app for the living-room Android TV, gives everyone in the room a view of what’s happening.
• Sentry, a native Swift app for my Mac, lets me watch the doggies while I’m working, including in Picture in Picture.

I supplied the goals and directed the work; Codex did the investigation and implementation described here. Codex also drafted this post.

Choosing the views

Both apps use local Home Assistant activity events to choose which cameras to show, with a direct event connection for one standalone camera. Video goes straight from the cameras or NVR to the viewing app. Home Assistant supplies the activity information without carrying the video.

Up to four cameras appear at once. Already-visible cameras keep their positions when another view arrives, and a cleared detection gets twenty seconds of grace. When everything goes quiet, the last active camera stays on screen. A dog briefly falling out of the camera’s detection zone shouldn’t make the whole layout collapse and reform.