u/Commercial_Froyo_247

Hey everyone!

Got some free time, so wanted to think out loud about something.

I was recently looking into what's new in the microcontroller space. ST has been firing out new series like crazy lately. Stumbled upon the STM32N6, a series with neural network and camera support. What's interesting is that the chip clearly has enough resources to support Matter and a Camera Device, and on top of that do object recognition on video thanks to the built-in NPU.

But that's all just background.

What about using a camera in a slightly unconventional way? Not just as a device that streams video, but as a smarter motion sensor with a brain. React only to specific types of objects, people, animals, cars and only when they appear in a defined zone. Basically what expensive security cameras already do, but as a native Matter device, no proprietary clouds involved.

And that leads to another question, how interesting would a bridge be for existing cameras? Something that takes a stream from a regular IP camera, analyzes the video locally, exposes the camera in Matter as a Camera Device, and at the same time publishes a separate Matter Occupancy/Motion Sensor with smart filtering by object class.

Essentially a Matter bridge for legacy cameras. No ripping out hardware, no cloud.

What do you think, is there demand for something like this? Or is it easier to just replace the cameras with native Matter devices?

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u/Commercial_Froyo_247 — 18 days ago

Hi community!

Early Monday morning post while I’m trying to find the mood to start working :)

I’ve had this question on my mind for a while: why are different open-source communities so different in how they behave?

Maybe it’s just my personal experience, but I’ve had some interaction with a few different communities, mostly Home Assistant and Zephyr.

With Home Assistant, things almost always went very smoothly for me. A few times I created tickets describing problems, a few times I sent pull requests with fixes, and honestly, I was very pleasantly surprised. Surprised by how friendly other contributors are and how much they actually try to help. If there is a problem, people discuss it, help figure it out, and help bring it to a solution.

With Zephyr, I have a slightly different impression so far. It feels like it’s quite difficult to propose changes there, even when you bring a solution to a specific problem. And that feels a bit strange, because Zephyr is a big and really cool project.

Maybe Zephyr just follows its rules much more strictly, and I just haven’t reached that zen yet :) Maybe this is generally typical for embedded projects? It seems to me that there are not many projects at Zephyr’s level, and it brings together a significant part of the people working in embedded development.

On the other hand, Home Assistant is one of many open-source projects, and maybe it simply has a different communication culture and a different entry barrier.

People from embedded, do you often propose fixes to open-source projects?

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u/Commercial_Froyo_247 — 19 days ago