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Intro
openskycam records a sky camera around the clock, keeps the footage on your own disk, and finds what flew past.
openskycam keeps every frame your sky camera encodes: a relay copies the stream into 60-second MP4 files without re-encoding. The files live on a disk you own. Cloudflare Workers catalog them, serve a website and an API, and hand frames to a processor that runs detection models. Packages and cloud resources keep the project’s first name, SkyVision (skyvision-dashboard, skyvision_processor, the skyvision-catalog database).
IP camera ──RTSP──▶ relay ──HTTPS PUT──▶ ingest Worker ──Tunnel──▶ footage store
H.264 or H.265 Linux host, checks, names, your disk,
60 s MP4s catalogs in D1 rolling 40 days
website + API Worker ◀── Cloudflare Access (people), API keys (scripts, agents)
│
└── jobs over HTTPS ──▶ processor: decodes frames, runs YOLO models, tracks motion
(macOS with Apple GPU, Linux with NVIDIA GPU, or CPU)What you can do with it
- Browse and download footage. Pick a day, scrub through hours, skip by 1 to 30 seconds, loop a few seconds, zoom into the 4K frame, and download the original file. Footage stays for 40 days.
- Find things in it. A Workshop workflow samples frames from a time window, runs one to four detection or classification models, and routes each frame to a bucket by class, score, count, time of day, or motion. Workflows can run on a schedule, for example every night.
- Tell planes from stars. Boxes from the same object are linked across a recording into a track. Each track is moving, stationary, or brief, so a workflow can keep moving planes and set fixed lights aside.
- Build training data. Review detections, accept or reject them, correct their boxes, and freeze a dataset version. A version records its images, labels, tracks, classes, and splits, and a script can download it.
- Script all of it. Everything the website does is also an API call under
/v1. AI agents can connect to the MCP server, which offers the same actions.
What it is made of
| Part | Runs on | Code |
|---|---|---|
| Relay | A Linux host near the camera, such as a Raspberry Pi | external/relay/ |
| Ingest Worker | Cloudflare | package/worker/ |
| Footage store | A macOS or Linux host with a large disk | external/store/ |
| Website and API Worker | Cloudflare | package/dashboard/ |
| Processor | A macOS or Linux host, GPU optional | processor/ |
| Catalog schema | Cloudflare D1 | db/migrations/ |
The store and the processor can be the same machine. Nothing in Cloudflare holds footage: the Workers reach the store through a Cloudflare Tunnel.
Where to go next
How it worksThe path of a recording, and of a workflow run, including what happens when a part is down.
RequirementsCameras, hosts, disk sizing, and the Cloudflare account.
Deploy your ownEvery step from a clone to video arriving.
ConfigurationEvery setting and its default.
WorkflowsSample frames, run detection models, and sort what they find into buckets.
APIKeys, scopes, and the /v1 API that does everything the website does.