Smrekar Family Hub & FaceoftheCabin
ImpressiveLLC / FaceoftheCabin · unicornpingpong.com (live — hub/cabin/api all public)
A self-hosted platform unifying home/property automation and family
coordination under a shared event bus, identity layer, and living
ontology — built for one family's real deployment (a Lenovo M920q at a
cabin, exposed via Cloudflare Tunnel, administered privately via
Tailscale) and designed from the start to be replicated independently
for another family, another property, or another team's use case. See
docs/REPLICATION.md for what that actually
takes.
📖 Platform governance — decisions (D1–D21), backlog, Definition of Done, sign-offs and iteration plans live in docs/governance/. Git is the canonical record.
The Living Ontology is a read-only rendered view of it.
Northstar Goals
- Unified family experience across cabin display, home machine, and phone via single domain (
unicornpingpong.com)
- See → Think → Act — every element and attribute supports this user interaction model at every UI surface
- Living ontology as primary differentiator — every data point is findable, traceable, and actionable across all platform verticals
- FAIR data throughout — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — enabling AI/RAG/LLM at any layer
- Event-driven architecture — camera → detection → normalized event → automation → action, with full audit trail
- Self-improving discovery — monthly, scheduled checks against industry-standard vendor sources and DIY/pro community pages, surfacing "next best idea" upgrade opportunities per cataloged device/service, not just new-purchase alerts. Fully specified in
ROADMAP.md's Tech ID Service section; not yet built — see that doc for honest status.
- Radical device flexibility — no device, protocol, or vendor is a hard architectural assumption; every integration follows the same ontology-first onboarding pattern (
docs/REPLICATION.md)
Products
| Product | Subdomain | Description |
|---|
| Family Hub | hub.unicornpingpong.com | Ambient display: clock, parenting schedule, calendar, photos, chores, rewards, family notepad |
| FaceOfTheCabin | cabin.unicornpingpong.com | Cabin automation: cameras, sensors, alerting, presence detection |
| Platform API | api.unicornpingpong.com | Shared services: identity, ontology, event bus, audit trail |
⚠️ Security note: camera activity on Family Hub
Family Hub's Overview page shows a live camera-activity widget from
FaceOfTheCabin — by default it shows which camera, what was detected,
and when, refreshed every 20 seconds, visible to anyone looking at the
screen, no sign-in required. This is genuinely useful (at a glance, is
anyone at the cabin right now) but it is also, unavoidably, a presence/
absence indicator — the same information that tells you "someone's home"
also tells anyone else looking that "no one's home right now."
This is configurable, not fixed. Settings → Cabin Camera Activity has
three levels:
- Full detail (default) — camera, object, timestamp.
- Activity only — just "recent activity: yes/no," no camera name, no
object, no precise time.
- Off — hides the widget entirely.
If this display sits somewhere more people can casually glance at than
just your own family (a shared space, a device you don't fully control
who sees), turn it down. The same warning is shown directly next to the
widget itself, with a link straight to this setting.
Video viewing (built 2026-08-02, see ROADMAP.md Phase 6) is a
separate, more sensitive surface from the widget above. cabin-ui's
Camera Events panel — authenticated, Google sign-in required, not
part of this public Family Hub widget — now shows real snapshots and
event clips, plus a live per-camera view. This is a meaningfully bigger
exposure than the metadata-only widget above: an image or video frame is
categorically more sensitive than "motion detected at 3:14pm." Concretely:
- Event clips: 15 seconds before to 60 seconds after each detected
event, kept 10 days.
- Continuous (24/7) recording: every camera's full feed, kept 5 days
— a deliberately short retention window given one camera's recording
stream is full 4K resolution (storage cost scales fast; extended only
after real usage is measured, not a guessed number).
- Live view: on-demand streaming, not itself separately recorded —
covered by continuous recording above.
None of this is reachable from the public, no-sign-in Family Hub widget
described earlier in this note — it lives entirely behind cabin-ui's own
Google sign-in (cabin.unicornpingpong.com), gated server-side on every
request, not just hidden client-side. If you ever add another signed-in
user to cabin-ui, they get this same video access — there's no separate,
finer-grained permission tier for video vs. the rest of cabin-ui today.
Repository Map
| Repo | Org | Contents |
|---|
| FaceoftheCabin | ImpressiveLLC | cabin-ui (React), cabin-backend (Spring Boot), family-hub (static HTML), infra (Docker Compose) |
| CabinAutomations | ImpressiveLLC | Zigbee pairing, HA config, Node-RED flows |
GitHub accounts: nhsmrekar (primary dev) · smrekarfamilia-sudo (family org) · ImpressiveLLC (shared/platform) | | |
Infrastructure Quick-Reference
| Item | Value |
|---|
| Primary server | Lenovo M920q · Ubuntu · Docker Compose at /home/nate/FaceoftheCabin/cabin-orchestration-platform/infra/ (/storage/containers/compose/cabin/ is a stale path from an earlier setup — confirmed unused, only a leftover .env and old CabinAutomations copy remain there) |
| Tailscale IP | 100.77.44.113 |
| Public access | Cloudflare Tunnel → unicornpingpong.com — live, all three subdomains |
| Private mesh | Tailscale — cabin ↔ home, admin/SSH |
| Domains | unicornpingpong.com — platform (hub/cabin/api subdomains) · impressive.llc — org domain |
| Domain registrar | Porkbun |
| DNS | Cloudflare free tier |
| Monitoring | Uptime Kuma + Homepage on M920q |
| Google OAuth owner | [email protected] |
| Calendar / Photos | [email protected] |
| Zigbee coordinator (Cabin) | /dev/ttyACM0 · adapter: ember · 14 devices paired |
| Home collector (POC) | SMLIGHT SLZB-MR5U + Termux on Android · PASS end-to-end 2026-09-11 (coordinator + real Zigbee network + MQTT reaching the M920q via Tailscale, independently verified both ends) — see docs/RUNLOG_2026-09-10_home-collector-mr5u-termux.md and docs/MAINTENANCE.md's "Home Location" section |
| Parenting schedule | Versioned rules — current: 50/50 split since July 27 2026 (see ROADMAP.md's Environment & Credentials Reference for the full detail; docs/ontology.yaml's parenting_schedule_rule_version is the source of truth) |
| Secrets | Ansible Vault (ansible/group_vars/*/vault.yml) — see ansible/README.md's Secrets section, not hand-edited .env |
Documentation Index
| Document | Location | Audience | Contents |
|---|
| User Guide | docs/USER_GUIDE.md | Family members, guests | Day-to-day usage: identity, profiles, notepad, chores, camera privacy |
| Maintenance & Ops | docs/MAINTENANCE.md | Operators, developers | Deployment, secrets, known issues, incident response |
| Replication Guide | docs/REPLICATION.md | New-instance implementers | Standing up an independent instance from scratch |
| Platform Roadmap | ROADMAP.md | Technical, product, strategic | Strategic brief, architecture, ontology design, priority task list |
| Product Vision | docs/PRODUCT_VISION.md | Family, stakeholders | Value proposition, competitive positioning, honest maturity — implementation-agnostic on purpose |
| Product Notes | docs/PRODUCT_NOTES.md | Product, design | Dated design decisions, persona research, architecture reviews |
| Ontology Contract | docs/ontology.yaml | Technical |
Quick Start — M920q Deploy
# SSH in via Tailscale
ssh [email protected]
# Deploy / rebuild a single service
cd ~/FaceoftheCabin && git pull
docker compose \
-f cabin-orchestration-platform/infra/docker-compose.yml \
-f cabin-orchestration-platform/infra/docker-compose.m920q.yml \
up -d --build <service-name>
Services: family-hub · cabin-ui · cabin-backend · cabin-grafana · postgres · kafka
