Uncle Matt, a wild-haired maker wearing round welding goggles Uncle Matt makes
The Backyard

It started with an opossum

We moved into a new place, my son spotted an opossum in the yard, and a couple of weeks after I put a camera on the back door my girlfriend called it the best project I have ever made.

originscritter camwildlife
A raccoon sitting upright on a stone garden wall in daylight, looking toward the camera.

A couple of nights after moving into our new place, my son saw something moving around in the backyard. It was an opossum, which in this house is a big deal: the opossum is my girlfriend’s favorite animal.

So we started looking forward to spotting them. Not in a project way, just faces at the window.

The backyard the camera watches: a low stone wall, a few pots, and the patch of ground where everybody eventually turns up.
The whole observatory. A sliding glass door, a stone wall, and a plate of snacks for whoever wanders through.

The camera came later

Nothing happened with it for a while. What actually kicked it off was a conversation with Claude about ways AI could improve my daily life. Point a camera at the yard and have it tell me who came by while we were asleep. That was the idea.

So that is what the backyard is now. A cheap webcam looking through the sliding door, and enough software behind it to notice movement, grab a picture, and take a guess at what it is looking at. I kept the collection side boring and robust on purpose. If you tie the data collection to the brains, you are likely to miss things that later prove important, and I would rather keep updating the brains against data I already have.

Then came the part I did not expect. For weeks we kept thinking it was the same raccoon visiting. Then we would notice subtle differences. A notch out of an ear. One that looks more beat up than the other. I wanted the app to help us understand the individuals, not just the species.

Meet Stan

The first one we named is Stan. Stan stands up, constantly, up on the back legs for a better look at the plate. Named him for it. Then one of those times he stood up we saw giant nipples and realized Stan was a momma. The name stuck anyway.

The camera catching Stan on the back deck, a green box drawn around him with a little "animal 0.64" label next to it.
The software spotting Stan, at 64% sure it is looking at an animal.

Within about two weeks my girlfriend called this the best project I have ever made. I have made a lot of things. That one landed.

Now I fire up the website with coffee and see who visited last night. I send her the good clips. We are learning what individual quirks these critters have, which neighbors keep coming back, all sorts of stuff. It is exciting.

Read “Behind the Glass”, the full making-of ↗

The code is on GitHub ↗

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