Ring Trail Cam

Inspiration

Ring cameras already catch a lot of wildlife, but Ring only recognizes people, vehicles and packages, so every animal visit just shows up as motion. I wanted to turn a Ring camera into a proper trail cam that tells you which animal walked by.

What it does

When a Ring camera picks up motion that isn't a person or a vehicle, Ring Trail Cam downloads the clip and runs it through Google's SpeciesNet wildlife model. If there's an animal in it, the clip goes into a field journal in your browser with the species name and how confident the model is. If there isn't, the clip is deleted so you're not left digging through empty footage.

It runs two ways: with a real Ring camera through a private Ring app, or as a simulation with the Ring Developer Playground.

How we built it

The app is a Python FastAPI service with a SQLite database and a browser dashboard. It uses the Ring Partner API for webhooks, event history, device location and clip downloads, and follows Ring's Computer Vision Guidelines: filter on Ring's own tags first, then run the model. SpeciesNet finds each animal with MegaDetector and names the species from the cropped animal, using the camera's country and state to rule out species that don't live there. A real camera connects through Ring's one-way account linking and a Cloudflare tunnel. The Playground simulation reads events from Ring's Event History.

Challenges we ran into

I don't have a Ring camera, so all testing went through the Ring Developer Playground. Each Playground button always plays the same clip, and there's no way to add your own footage, so testing variety was limited. I added a command that sends public domain trail camera clips through the same pipeline to test more scenes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working pipeline from a Ring event to a named species on the dashboard, a one-command start, and a setup that works with either the Playground or a real Ring camera.

What we learned

How the Ring Partner API fits together, from webhooks and event history to clip downloads and account linking, and how to run a wildlife model on real camera footage.

What's next for Ring Trail Cam

Publishing it to the Ring App Store, so any Ring customer can connect their camera without a developer account.

Built With

• animals
• identification
• megadetector
• nature
• opensource
• ring
• speciesnet
• trailcam