Building a Pool Monitor with Raspberry Pi and Roboflow

Grace Freund describes a project where a Raspberry Pi, a phone camera, and a Roboflow classification model are used to monitor a pool's water level and alert when a refill is needed. Inspired by a colleague's demos of Roboflow running on a Raspberry Pi, Freund sets up a system at home in Saint Louis to address her father's need to know the pool's water status without manual checking. The project involves turning a phone into a wireless RTSP camera to stream video to the Raspberry Pi, where the Roboflow Inference server processes the frames locally. After initial setup challenges, such as switching from a GPU-dependent to a CPU-only Roboflow container, Freund captures and labels images of the pool's water level to train a visual state recognition model, specifically using the DINOv3 Small classification model. The Raspberry Pi then serves a live dashboard via a small Flask web app, providing a real-time pool status to household members. Despite the simplicity and affordability of the setup, the project effectively addresses a practical problem with minimal technical expertise required, and future enhancements are considered, such as a permanently mounted camera and automated hose activation.

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