Vacant Home Watch

Your house reports on itself while you are gone.

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Inspiration

Snowbirds and home-watch companies leave Florida houses empty for months. The cameras are already on the wall. Nobody is there to notice water, a failed air conditioner, or a door left open.

What it does

Vacant Home Watch links a Ring account, stores a day, dusk, and night baseline for each camera, and sweeps those cameras on a schedule. A pixel check skips the model when the frame is unchanged. If it changed, a vision compare ranks the finding and the owner app shows the before and after. Look now opens a live view. An operator sees one triage queue for the homes they watch.

How we built it

Python 3.12. Ring calls stay server-side: token exchange, one-way account linking, signed webhooks, image download, WHEP live view, and event clips. Tests run against an in-repo Ring emulator. Production vision compare is Google Gemini through OpenRouter. Grok and Bedrock are supported alternatives. Judges can sign in at the deployed app. The CDK stack is synthesized. Local sweeps run in-process.

Challenges we ran into

Ring image download returns an existing frame, not a new picture. A media window that starts before account consent comes back 403. Device resources do not name the camera kind. Those are recorded in the friction log.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A judge can run the loop without Tim's cameras: three demo homes, the pixel gate, the vision compare, and an in-app alerts outbox. Owner language stays measured: growth or discoloration, no code citations, each item routed to a licensed trade.

What we learned

An empty house needs a baseline, not a motion alert. Unchanged frames should never call the model.

What's next

A live mailbox for evidence packs, and Ring Appstore billing. Not in the running app yet.

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