A privacy first home rover
I’m building a small self-hosted remote presence rover.
The original joke was: “what if I could FaceTime my cat?” But the project has slowly turned into something more interesting: a no-cloud, privacy-first rover that you can summon from a browser to look around your home, garage, workshop, plant room, or wherever you do not want always-on cloud cameras watching everything.
No app.
No account.
No subscription.
No cloud bullshit.
Just a Linux laptop, cameras, WebRTC, Flask/Socket.IO, Tailscale/LAN access, and a control panel I’m building from scratch.
Current onboard software already includes:
live front camera and back camera
real-time two-way audio
system health panel
browser-based driving controls
one-button “Face Screen” mode, where the rover laptop opens a fullscreen video-call-style display
phone camera → rover screen video relay, fully self-hosted
Right now I’m focusing mostly on the onboard software and control stack. The robotics side is still coming: tracked drivetrain, motor control, Hall encoder odometry, sensors for safer roaming, and eventually basic autonomous/free-roam behavior. I’m also planning local cat detection later: tiny onboard model, webcam detection, snapshot, and private alerting.
I don’t really want a “smart home” in the usual sense. I want a dumb home with tools I control.
So tbh the idea is less “pet robot toy” and more:
A camera you summon, not one that watches.
A remote presence rover with local-first control.
For people who hate cloud cameras but still want to check what’s happening.
Curious if this is just my weird personal project, or if other privacy/self-hosting/homelab people would actually want something like this.