Tortoise Guard is an AI vision monitoring system designed for the safety of pet tortoises. Developed during the openAI Build Week it serves as an alert aid to notify owners if a tortoise has flipped upside down which can be a life-threatening situation. This is an “apps for your life” project. The system monitors the tortoise enclosure and constantly sends snapshots to a mini pc. The computer runs Openclaw (an Open-Source AI agent with full access to the computer) which runs another image detection model on top. It takes the snapshot and checks to see if the tortoise is upside down. If it is, Openclaw will send a signal back to the camera so it can sound an alarm. After this a person can come help the tortoise. The hardware used for the camera is an ESP32 cam AI thinker module. This project's structure and code was created using chatgpt 5.6 and codex. The code will always verify that the tortoise is upside down twice to avoid false alarms. Demo mode will detect a toy or a printed figure instead of a real tortoise by removing color and making the image grayscale.
This was a family project born from personal necessity after we saw our own pet tortoise (Tzvika) being flipped over several times, realizing how vulnerable they are in such situations. The main challenge was the firmware for the ESP32, which required optimization for stable snapshot and transmission. Selecting an image model was also very important as we needed a solution capable of receiving and recognizing low-resolution images with high accuracy. Additionally, managing latency was critical to ensure the alert was triggered quickly enough to be effective.
During the development process, we gained hands-on experience in building a custom skill for the Openclaw, which involved configuring its ability to process external triggers and interact with the local file system.
Looking ahead, we aim to implement a comprehensive statistics engine that can create a daily digest of the tortoise's activity. By tracking movement patterns the system could create a health baseline and proactively detect if the tortoise is becoming sick or exhibiting behavior that has signs of illness for example.
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