Pick your page — cameras
The question	The page that answers only that
How do five jobs get five aims?	This page: buy, add, mount at cat height, night, naming.
Which cameras work with Frigate?	Any camera that speaks RTSP, and why we use Tapo C120 / C210.
How do you keep the network sane?	Reservations, naming by job, the public/house split.
How does a camera go public safely?	The public cam proxy: four public, Frigate never on the internet.
What watches the cameras?	Frigate · Frigate camera setup.

Why five

A job is not a room.

One wide in a hallway will not give you a drink, a meal, a beauty shot, a walk, and a face. People buy a cat security camera and then point it at everything. That is how you get a ceiling and no cat. We pointed five cameras at five ordinary things Helen already does.

The live cat camera is a sitting room, not a tour of the house. Court is overhead of the whole room — not a scratch pad. Face is the opener because a viewer on a phone decides in the first half-second. The court is the geography. This page is how the lenses sit in it.

Name the job first. Then mount the camera.

Buy five ordinary home-network cameras. Store cameras. Same family if you can — one app, five pictures. Wired is steadier. Wireless works if the sitting room is close to the house box. Ours send a wide picture, 2560 by 1440, twenty frames a second. That is a normal security stream, not a cinema camera. The amazing part is five jobs and a crop that follows the cat. The one test a camera has to pass, and the ones we bought: which cameras work with Frigate.
Add them in the camera app first. Plug each one in. Wait until you can see a live picture in the maker’s app. That means the stream exists. Frigate will use that same stream later. Getting that stream out of the camera and into Frigate, with the sub-stream for detection and the main stream for recording, is camera setup.
Write the job on tape on the camera. Water, Food, Treat, Court, Face. Do this before you climb a chair. A leftover factory name will follow you into the cut. The same name has to appear in three places on the computer, and each camera needs an address that never changes: network and naming.
Mount at the height the job needs. Face and Treat sit at a sitting cat’s eye line — a low table, not a shelf. Food sits a little back so you get body and bowl. Water sits higher, looking down at the fountain. Court sits up, looking at the whole floor.
Aim slightly high of center on Face and Food. She ducks to eat. If you aim at the empty bowl, you get ears and ceiling. Leave a little sky above her head.
Night-test before you lock the screws. After dark, open each view on your phone. If Water has no glow and Face is a smear, move the light or the camera now. Do not invent a night look later.

Water Cam: fountain with blue glow and Halloween set

Water High over the fountain. The glow is the night look. Do not invent a grade later.

Food Body and bowl. The approach along the runner. You need the whole cat, not just kibble.

Treat Cam: eye-level beauty shot of the dispenser corner

Treat Eye-level beauty. Closest, warmest, whiskers readable.

Court Cam: overhead of the whole sitting room

Court Overhead of the whole room. Establishing wide. Not a scratch pad.

Face Head-on at the bowl. The opener. A curated still here — not a public stream.

How we aim them

Copy the jobs. Then copy the height.

You can copy this without our brand. One room. Five jobs. Cat height. A phone will crop whatever you shoot, so leave her room or plan to follow her. The cut comes later. The live cat camera only works if the aim is honest first.

One room. Do not cover the house. A cat security camera that tries to watch every doorway watches none of them well. Pick the sitting room she already uses. Water, food, a treat, a crossing, a face. That is the whole set. Bedrooms stay off the map.
Give five cameras five jobs. Water sits high over the fountain so the glow reads. Food takes the body and the bowl. Treat is eye-level beauty. Court is overhead of the whole room — not a scratch pad. Face is head-on at the bowl. That last one is the opener. If two cameras share a job, one of them is wasted.
Mount low. A cat at a bowl has her head down. A camera on a shelf looks at ears and ceiling. Get down to her height, then aim slightly high of center so the face stays in frame when she ducks to eat. Cat height is the whole craft. Everything else is furniture.
Plan the tall slice. Wide cameras on a phone become a tall slice. If you crop the middle you lose the cat — ears, tail, the walk out of frame. Either follow her through the wide, or leave room around her so a tight crop still has a subject. Do not discover this after you publish.
Let day be hard. Let night keep the glow. Day is harder. White walls blow out. The fountain has to work for a living. Night can be the look if the water already glows. Do not invent a night grade. If the room does not already have a light, no filter will give you one.
Re-aim when a name is a leftover. Court used to sound like a pad. After the tilt it is the establishing wide. If the label and the picture disagree, trust the picture. Rename later if you must. A leftover name will keep you mounting for a job that no longer exists.
No bedrooms. No people in frame. Privacy is a mount decision, not a blur you add later. Do not point a live cat camera at a bed. Do not leave a person in the shot. The court is a sitting room. The rest of the house is not the show.

Product and tech specs

Normal cameras. A court that feels like a set.

These are home security cameras on a sitting-room network. Same kind of box you can buy this week. We did not rent cinema glass. We gave eight ordinary lenses five jobs, mounted them at cat height, and let a later cut steal a tall phone picture from a wide frame. The computer that watches them is a regular Windows PC with no graphics card; the Intel graphics inside its processor finds the cat. The exact models we bought, and how to tell whether any camera will work with Frigate, are on which camera.

What the cameras actually send
Spec	What we do with it
Kind	Ordinary home-network cameras. One family, one app, five pictures. Add them in the maker’s app first so the stream exists.
Picture	Wide 2560×1440, twenty frames a second. That is a normal security stream.
Phone crop	A Short is tall: 1080×1920. We take a slice of the wide frame and let the crop follow the cat. A frozen center crop throws her away.
Height	Face and Treat at a sitting cat’s eye line. Food a little back for body and bowl. Water high over the fountain. Court up, whole floor.
Night	The fountain’s own glow. No invented night grade. If the room has no light, no filter will give you one.

Live proof

Four public stills. One curated face.

These four chambers refresh from the performing site. Face Cam stays a curated frame on this page — /assets/cams/face.jpg — because it is not a public stream. We say that so you do not copy a lie. Watch the live cat camera those stills come from.

Go next door

helenthecatlive.com is the show. Water, food, treat, and court are public. Face is a workshop camera, not a public stream. This page teaches the aim. The live cat camera is the proof.

A moment ago

The same cameras, moving. Face (top left) is the one this page shows only as a curated frame; Water is the high angle over the fountain; Treat is the eye-level beauty cam. Watch how each aim reads on a small pane: that is the test a job has to pass.

Day and night

White walls will fight you.

If you are setting up cat security cameras for Shorts, light the job you already named. Do not add a look in the cut that the room never had. Night is allowed to be the look when the fountain already glows. Day has to hold without that help.

After the mount

Aim first. Then watch. Then cut.

Frigate can name a visit after the cameras are honest. The cut can follow her through the tall slice. YouTube is where a Short lives. None of that fixes a camera that is too high, or a leftover name still pointed at a pad. How we use Frigate. · How we cut. · How a Short ships.

Helen is a dilute tortoiseshell calico. She does not take direction. The jobs have to wait for her.

Publishing a camera safely

Four of these cameras are on a public website. Frigate is not. The public sees one fresh still per camera, fetched through a small read-only proxy that only knows the names of the four public cameras and refuses everything else; the three cameras that watch the rest of the house cannot be reached from the site at all. How to put a Frigate camera on a public site without exposing Frigate. If you want live video rather than stills, that goes to YouTube instead: the two 24/7 streams. And before you buy a drive for the recordings, the storage math from ours.

Live proof

Open https://helenthecatlive.com/. If the five jobs are not readable there, the mount is not done — no matter how the stills look on this page.