Homma | Ring camera visit summaries

Inspiration

It started with a simple frustration. After a weekend trip, I came back home and opened the Ring app. There were almost 40 “Motion detected” notifications. Some were packages, some were people walking by, some were just leaves or shadows. I spent nearly 15 minutes scrolling through them trying to figure out what actually happened while I was gone. It felt messy and useless.

I talked to a few friends who have Ring cameras. Almost everyone had the same complaint — too many alerts, no clear summary. Especially people who travel a lot, or who manage Airbnb places, or who check on elderly parents. They don’t want 40 separate alerts. They just want one simple answer: “What happened while I was away?” That’s how Homma started.

What it does

Homma connects to your Ring cameras and watches for you when you leave home. When you’re away, it quietly records the important visits — people, cars, packages — and ignores the noise. When you come back (or check the app), it gives you one clean summary:

“While you were away from 2:14 PM to 7:42 PM:

• 3 people visited

• 2 cars stopped

• 1 package was left

• Nothing unusual happened.”

You can also see short thumbnails of each visit if you want more details. No more endless scrolling through motion alerts.

How we built it

We used the official Ring Partner API to get real motion events and snapshots from the cameras. When a motion alert comes in, our backend checks if the user is in “Away Mode.” If yes, it downloads a snapshot and sends it to a vision model to figure out whether it’s a person, car, or package.

All the events are stored in Supabase. When the user turns Away Mode off, we group the events into visits, count everything, and generate a short natural language summary. The frontend is a simple Next.js app that shows the live status and the final briefing.

We kept the whole system lightweight so it can run on free tiers during the hackathon.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was dealing with too many motion events. Ring can send multiple alerts for the same person walking past the camera. We had to write logic to group them into single visits instead of treating every alert separately.

Getting clear snapshots at the right moment was also tricky. Sometimes the image was too dark or the person had already moved out of frame. We spent a lot of time testing different timing approaches.

Another issue was making the summary feel natural. Early versions sounded robotic. We kept rewriting the prompts until the briefing felt like something a helpful friend would say.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

i am proud that the core idea actually works end-to-end with real Ring cameras. Seeing a clean “Welcome Home” summary after a real Away session felt really good.

i also managed to keep the interface very simple. The whole experience is basically two buttons: “I’m Leaving” and “I’m Home.” Everything else happens in the background.

Most importantly, people who tested it immediately understood the value. That was the best feedback we got.

What we learned

We learned that solving a real daily annoyance is more powerful than building something flashy. A lot of smart home tools give you more data. What people actually want is less noise and clearer answers.

We also learned how important it is to group and summarize events instead of just showing raw alerts. That small design decision changed the whole product.

Working with the Ring API taught us a lot about real-time events, webhooks, and handling imperfect camera data.

What's next for Homma | Ring camera visit summaries

Next we want to make Away Mode smarter — for example, automatically detecting when you leave based on phone location. We also plan to add support for multiple cameras and simple risk alerts (like someone lingering too long at the door).

Long term, we’d love to turn Homma into a small but useful daily companion for anyone who owns a Ring camera and hates scrolling through endless motion alerts.

Built With

• python
• typescript