A camera that decides where to look
Most hobby surveillance projects stop at "stream a webcam to a browser." Netra doesn't. It's a closed-loop system: an ESP32-CAM streams frames, a YOLOv8 model finds the person in them, and the result drives two servos that physically turn the camera to keep that person centered — all coordinated over MQTT. The name comes from the Sanskrit word for eye, and that's the honest description of what it is: an eye that moves on its own.
It started as a Microprocessors & Microcontrollers course project and I kept building until it was a full edge-to-cloud stack. This post walks through how the pieces actually fit together.
The stack, end to end
There are four moving parts, and each one only does its own job:
