melo-gonzo/cyclops

Cyclops is a firmware project for small ESP32 microcontroller boards that turns them into self-contained camera systems with audio and motion detection. You flash the firmware onto a Seeed XIAO ESP32S3 Sense or an AI-Thinker ESP32-CAM board, and the device starts serving a live video stream along with a web dashboard that you open in any browser on your network. No cloud account, no app, and no external server is required. The main feature is a live MJPEG video stream that multiple viewers can watch at the same time. The XIAO board, which has a built-in microphone, adds audio monitoring on top: you can hear live audio in the browser and see a real-time frequency spectrum. Both boards support motion detection, which watches for changes between frames. When motion or a sound crosses a threshold you set, the device can save a short video clip to an SD card or to the board's own memory. The dashboard is one dark-themed web page that shows the live stream, audio levels, a scrolling spectrogram, and a timeline of events with markers for what triggered each one. You can browse and play clips directly in the browser. Camera settings, WiFi configuration, and firmware updates are all controlled through this dashboard, so you rarely need a USB cable after the first flash. Getting started takes four steps: flash the firmware using PlatformIO, connect to the temporary WiFi access point the device raises, enter your home network credentials through the setup page, and then access the device at its local address. After that first setup, the device stays on your network and you can update the firmware over the air. The codebase is written in C++ and targets the Arduino and ESP-IDF ecosystems. The more complex logic, such as audio trigger thresholds, motion analysis, and file path safety, is separated into standalone header-only files that have their own unit tests you can run on a regular computer without any hardware.