Watch the 3D court Open the performing site. Walk the sitting room. Then copy how we staged five stations and rebuilt them as a place you can turn. https://helenthecatlive.com/ · How to build the court
Watch the shop, then the drop White PetSafe. 5-volt dry switch soldered to the remote — not 120. Normal machine, amazing click. https://helenthecatlive.com/shop/ · How the solder trick works
Watch the channel Shorts-first. The endcard sends people to the live domain. Then copy four daily doors and one ask. https://www.youtube.com/@helenthecatlive · How we post
Watch the aired premiere S1E01 · The Letter. Then copy the cut: time order, open on a cat, close before empty room. Two earlier cuts of the same footage stay unlinked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7GzVismnhI · How we cut
This workshop
You are on the making-of. The show is next door. Use this domain to learn the method, then prove it against the live links above.
This site
The workshop home: https://helencam.com/. Start at the whole build, then jump to Court, Cameras, Frigate, Cut, YouTube, or Treat.
Four public cams, a moment ago
Watch these stills refresh from the live site. Then copy the jobs: water, food, treat, court. Same cameras as the homepage strip. Face is not in this row — it is curated below.
Copy the step
Give each camera one job before you ask it to fill a Short. How we aim the five. Frigate watches so you do not sit there. How we use Frigate.
Face, curated
Face Cam Head-on at the bowl. This frame is chosen for the workshop. It is not a public stream. Watch the other four refresh above. Copy the idea: an eating close-up that can open a Short.
Then copy the open The aired chapter starts on a readable cat, not empty furniture. Play S1E01 · The cut
The court, and the cat inside it
The live site is a three.js room you can turn in. The cat in the middle is a generated mesh, compressed until it is smaller than most photographs. You can download the actual file the page loads and open it in any glTF viewer.
- Walk the room https://helenthecatlive.com/ · how the scene is built
- The sitting cat, 738 kB https://helenthecatlive.com/models/helen-sit-std.glb · how it was generated and fixed
- The Helen Morse bust, 781 kB https://helenthecatlive.com/models/helen-morse-bust.glb · the namesake gallery
- The show-site write-up https://helenthecatlive.com/build/3d-court/
Four live pictures, one URL each
These are the endpoints the court's walls and the strips on this site refresh from. Each returns the newest frame from that camera as a JPEG, fetched through a read-only proxy that never exposes Frigate. Open one, wait a few seconds, reload. They are rate-limited to forty requests every ten seconds per visitor, so link them, do not hot-link them.
- Water Cam https://helenthecatlive.com/live-cam/api/cam/cat_water_bowl/latest.jpg
- Food Cam https://helenthecatlive.com/live-cam/api/cam/cat_food_bowl/latest.jpg
- Treat Cam https://helenthecatlive.com/live-cam/api/cam/cat_treat_dispenser/latest.jpg
- Court Cam https://helenthecatlive.com/live-cam/api/cam/cat_scratching_pad/latest.jpg
- All four on one plain page https://helenthecatlive.com/live-cat-cams/ · the Android app the proxy was built for
Copy the step
Four cameras public, eleven in Frigate, Frigate never on the internet. How the proxy works. Which four, and why the house cameras can never appear: naming and the allowlist. What finds the cat in those frames: an Intel iGPU under WSL2.
Two streams that never stop
Both run from the computer at home with ffmpeg and no OBS. The mosaic is four cameras stitched into one 1080p picture and encoded on the processor's built-in graphics; the Face stream is one camera, re-timed to fifteen frames a second because YouTube will not take a raw camera stream. Video ids change if a broadcast is recreated, so the streams tab is the durable link.
- The live tab https://www.youtube.com/@helenthecatlive/streams
- Face / Water / Treat / Bed mosaic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaRC7bsF-pM (id at time of writing)
- Face Cam, single camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrPoY5QHLdw (id at time of writing)
Copy the step
How to stream a camera to YouTube 24/7 without OBS. The scripts, verbatim: tile-live, flagship-live, foodcam-live.
What the pipeline posted on its own
S1E01 above was cut by hand. Everything below was cut and posted by a program: it reads the visits Frigate found, builds the shot list in time order, crops for a phone, writes the decree with a model, and uploads. A person still reviews; nobody presses render.
- The Shorts tab, the pipeline's output https://www.youtube.com/@helenthecatlive/shorts
- A recent auto-cut Short (water) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw4u5Rsv0HY
- The Royal Drinking Hours, a daily compilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HttsVIoFys
- The Reign of Helen, Day 23, a long-arc cut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFw0_dc7nBQ
- The channel snapshot the site refreshes from https://helenthecatlive.com/api/youtube (the latest fifteen videos as JSON)
Copy the step
The pipeline, from Frigate events to a posted Short. The two models it calls, the prompts and the filter: the AI page. Which tool did which job on the build: the tool page.
The treat counter
The server that takes the two dollars keeps a public counter. feedReady is true when the keys and the link to the house are all present; remaining is how many treats are left under today's cap. It is the last thing checked before the button is shown.
- The counter, live JSON https://helenthecatlive.com/api/feed/stats
- The backend heartbeat https://helenthecatlive.com/api/health
- Moving checkout onto the domain https://helenthecatlive.com/build/on-domain-checkout/
Copy the step
Stripe webhook to Home Assistant to relay, all the code. Where that server lives and how a release goes live: Caddy, pm2 and symlink releases.
Every public URL, written out
- 3D court https://helenthecatlive.com/
- Shop and treat https://helenthecatlive.com/shop/ · how it is built: the 3D shop and print-on-demand
- The website itself what the 3D site is made of · what it downloads · the shop's floor plan
- Build-in-public index on the show site https://helenthecatlive.com/build/
- Press https://helenthecatlive.com/press/
- YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@helenthecatlive
- S1E01 · The Letter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7GzVismnhI
- This workshop https://helencam.com/
Private takes stay unlinked. The Frigate screen, Home Assistant, and the proxy's own address are never linked from anywhere. If a public room is missing, tell us.