Honestly I just started thinking about this again yesterday so I basically know nothing lol. Though i did come across frigate, and it did make me want to try and setup a local home security system (as I’ve been meaning to get away from using a wireless one from one of the big manufacturers of such things).
I’ve been doing a bit of a dive into something called YOLOv8, which seems to be an object detection model, where you can use existing models, or train your own. Utilizing that on maybe a RPi 5 with a camera and a Google Coral (which from my understanding, supercharges your hardware’s ability to process such things), and then using the output from the model somehow to control some type of actuation (electromagnet maybe?) to lock or unlock a catflap.
But I think the hardware is a bit hard to track down
Yeah I think from memory, one of the main reasons I had abandoned it last time I looked was that it was so hard to get the relevant hardware. Having a look again, it seems that most things are quite readily available now :)