Sentinel Turns Old Phones Into AI Cameras

This is a compelling hardware-arbitrage project, but it is still closer to an extensible prototype than a production-ready security system.

• –Repurposes old Android phones as inexpensive, distributed camera nodes.
• –Keeps capture and monitoring on the local network, reducing cloud dependence.
• –PC-side Flask/OpenCV processing enables recording, dashboards, and structured AI events.
• –Multimodal inference may still rely on an online model service, so “local” does not guarantee end-to-end privacy.
• –Manual pairing, missing production hardening, and debug-signed Android builds raise deployment friction.