Small builds that earn their keep on day one.

flies today

A knock on the bedroom door

Headphones on, door closed, world off — and you still catch the knock.

The Canary WAP's mic doesn't record; it watches for shape. Three or more short raps, evenly spaced, inside two seconds — that's a knock, and the firmware says so: a Pattern: Knock signal into Home Assistant, and the app chimes whatever is on your ears. It ships as an opt-in flag (FEATURE_ACOUSTIC_TRANSIENTS) in today's WAP firmware — flip it on when you flash.

The mic path reduces sound to three loudness figures per 20 ms and zeroes the buffer. The word "knock" is the only thing that ever leaves the device.

Want the pin-drop remix — a coin-cell vibration sensor riding the door itself, asleep until the wood moves? So do we. That board doesn't exist yet; vote it forward on Ideas.

flies today

A listener for the alarms you already own

Your smoke alarm is loud, certified, and utterly unable to call you.

Smoke and CO alarms beep in standardized cadences — the T3 pattern for smoke (NFPA 72 / ISO 8201), T4 for carbon monoxide (UL 2034). The WAP recognizes both with a two-stage detector — a frequency gate, then a cadence match — and raises the one alert that's allowed to interrupt you: phone silenced, away from home, doesn't matter.

⚠︎ Advisory only. It listens to alarms you already own. It is not a smoke or CO detector and never replaces one — and low-frequency 520 Hz sounders aren't supported yet.

Same privacy barrier as the knock: cadence in, one label out, audio never stored.

flies today

The blackout canary

The original canary move: when it goes quiet, that is the signal.

A mains-powered Canary that vanishes from the network is itself an alert — the app treats "gone dark" as a signal worth raising, not a shrug. Canaries also beacon to each other over low-power radio, so the fleet's picture of who's still standing survives a dead router.

Detection by absence, honestly labeled: it can't yet tell "the outage took the power" from "the outage took the router." A true mains-voltage probe is proposed — vote for it.

on the bench

Door open, door shut

A reed switch and a magnet — the oldest sensor in security, finally with a witness attached.

The fusion engine already keeps a seat for it: a contact-sensor lane with its own vote, weight, and fault state, and a Sentinel "Door" preset built around it. What's missing is the last inch — every shipped config still says FEATURE_CONTACT 0, and the spare pin is documented, reserved, and unread.

A reed switch draws essentially nothing at rest, which makes this the natural first battery build. Months-on-a-battery is the goal we'll prove on the bench — not a number we'll print first.

on the bench

Room weather

Not security — comfort. The same honesty pointed at "why is the nursery cold at 3 a.m.?"

The display firmware can already draw temperature and humidity trends; nothing in the fleet produces them yet — there's no temp/humidity sensor driver in the tree. The bench tools even recognize the usual chips (SHT4x, BME280) when they scan a wire. This build is a five-dollar sensor and one driver away from trends with provenance: not "it feels drafty," but a signed record of when the room actually drops.

proposed

The feeder bell

A soft ping when the feeder has a visitor — and a day list of who came by.

Canary Vision already runs its detection on the camera module's own NPU, with only labels crossing the wire — today that model looks for people. The same silicon can run a bird model; that's real new work (a model to train, not a monthly fee), and the outdoor case already exists. The solar perch is sketched in the fence-guard project — a stub today, honestly.

Pixels never leave the camera module. Your yard is not a stream.

The hardware you'd start from exists — the bird model doesn't. That's the vote.

proposed

The litter box ledger

The vet asks "how many visits a day?" Nobody knows. The box could.

Visit count and dwell time are the two numbers that surface urinary trouble early — and they need no camera. Radar presence, the Canary Sense lane, can log a visit without ever filming the corner of your bathroom. One cat works on timing alone; telling up to three apart is the honest hard part. The proposal pairs the timer with a load-cell mat under the box, because weight tells your cats apart where a camera shouldn't.

None of this is in the tree yet — no load-cell driver, no mat. It starts as a vote.

For you and your vet. Trend data, not a diagnosis — and never a substitute for one.