First flights

Small builds that earn their keep on day one.

Seven cheap, quick builds that are useful the same evening — each badged by what the firmware really does today.

Start with what flies → Vote the rest forward
flies today in today's firmware — build and flash it yourself on the bench the firmware seat exists; the last part isn't wired proposed not started — the Ideas page is the steering wheel

Flies today

Flash one tonight

Three builds on one Canary WAP you build yourself — kits wait on FCC authorization. Some need an opt-in build flag; we say which.

flies today

A knock on the bedroom door

Headphones on, door closed, world off — and you still catch the knock.

The WAP's mic doesn't record; it listens for shape. Three or more evenly spaced raps inside two seconds become a Pattern: Knock signal in Home Assistant, and the app chimes in your headphones. Turn on the opt-in flag (FEATURE_ACOUSTIC_TRANSIENTS) when you flash.

The mic path reduces sound to three loudness figures per 20 ms and zeroes the buffer. The word "knock" is the only thing that ever leaves the device.

A coin-cell vibration sensor on the door itself? That board doesn't exist yet — vote it forward.

Build a WAP → What else it can do
flies today

A listener for the alarms you already own

Your smoke alarm is loud, certified, and utterly unable to call you.

Smoke and CO alarms beep in standard patterns — T3 for smoke (NFPA 72 / ISO 8201), T4 for carbon monoxide (UL 2034). The WAP recognizes both and raises the one alert allowed to interrupt you, even when your phone is silenced or you're away from home.

⚠︎ Advisory only. It listens to alarms you already own. It is not a smoke or CO detector and never replaces one — and low-frequency 520 Hz sounders aren't supported yet.

Same privacy barrier as the knock: cadence in, one label out, audio never stored.

Build a WAP → How the record stays honest
flies today

The blackout canary

The original canary move: when it goes quiet, that is the signal.

A mains-powered Canary that vanishes from the network is itself an alert — the app treats "gone dark" as a signal worth raising, not a shrug. Canaries also beacon to each other over low-power radio, so the fleet's picture of who's still standing survives a dead router.

Detection by absence, honestly labeled: it can't yet tell "the outage took the power" from "the outage took the router." A true mains-voltage probe is proposed — vote for it.

Build a WAP → See the fleet view

On the bench

One part away

The firmware already has a seat for these. Each card names the missing piece — the piece your vote moves.

on the bench

Door open, door shut

A reed switch and a magnet — the oldest sensor in security, finally with a witness attached.

The fusion engine already has a contact-sensor lane and a Sentinel "Door" preset. What's missing is the driver: every shipped config still says FEATURE_CONTACT 0.

A reed switch draws essentially nothing at rest, which makes this the natural first battery build. Months-on-a-battery is the goal we'll prove on the bench — not a number we'll print first.

Vote this up → Watch the repo
on the bench

Room weather

Not security — comfort. The same honesty pointed at "why is the nursery cold at 3 a.m.?"

The display firmware already draws temperature and humidity trends, and the bench tools recognize the usual chips (SHT4x, BME280) — but there's no sensor driver in the tree yet. One driver and a five-dollar sensor stand between "it feels drafty" and a signed record of when the room actually gets cold.

Vote this up → Why comfort belongs here

Proposed

Not started — and not pretending otherwise

Two designs with no line of firmware yet. Votes on the Ideas page move them up the bench.

proposed

The feeder bell

A soft ping when the feeder has a visitor — and a day list of who came by.

Canary Vision already runs detection on the camera module's own NPU, and only labels cross the wire — today it looks for people. A bird model is real new work (a model to train, not a monthly fee). The outdoor case exists; the solar perch is a stub.

Pixels never leave the camera module. Your yard is not a stream.

Vote this up → Where outdoor vision is headed
proposed

The litter box ledger

The vet asks "how many visits a day?" Nobody knows. The box could.

Visit count and dwell time surface urinary trouble early, and they need no camera: radar presence (the Canary Sense lane) can log a visit. One cat works on timing alone; telling up to three apart needs a load-cell mat under the box — weight, not a camera.

None of this is in the tree yet — no load-cell driver, no mat. It starts as a vote.

For you and your vet. Trend data, not a diagnosis — and never a substitute for one.

Vote this up → The camera-free wellbeing lane

The pair demo

First Light

A Canary Vision and a Canary Nightlight, powered on a desk with nothing else — no Wi-Fi, no hub, no app, no account. Wave at the camera and the pocket glass names what the camera's own silicon saw, the moment it saw it.

The glass shows PERSON and how sure it is, plus the one number it can measure on its own clock: how fast it reacted to the radio. That radio is the unsigned presence beacon every Canary speaks — so the demo shows speed and honesty, not evidence. The signed witness chain is a separate channel the demo never touches.

Status: the pair-demo firmware is in the securaCV tree; the Nightlight's board is compile-tested and awaiting bench validation; and no radio-bearing kit is sold until FCC authorization completes. The glossary defines both halves; Compare & Kits shows where the Vision sits.

For makers: reading the latency by eye

On camera hosts with a status LED, the LED pulses the instant detection flips; the gap between LED and glass is the latency. The planned kit's board, a XIAO ESP32-C3, has no user LED, so there the camera's side is on the serial log. The radio carries no timestamps, so each device reports only what it measured — the demo never invents an end-to-end figure.

What we won't claim

  • "Flies today" means in the current firmware — some of it behind opt-in build flags — carried to your phone by Home Assistant or the app. It does not mean a boxed product with a setup wizard.
  • The alarm listener is advisory. It is not a life-safety device, it never replaces a working smoke or CO alarm, and it has documented limits — 520 Hz sounders, for one, are unsupported.
  • Battery-life numbers appear when the bench proves them, not before.

Recording other people? Know your local law. A camera or microphone that takes in a shared space can come with notice or consent rules where it is installed, and where a Canary goes is your call — so checking those rules is too.

Start the fleet with one bird.

Every build above starts with one Canary you build yourself — or a vote that costs nothing.

Build one → Vote on Ideas
or join the conversation on GitHub Discussions