Offline Baby Cam — HearthCam

HearthCam turns two devices into a baby monitor that never talks to the internet. One phone watches the crib. The other stays with you. Nothing in between.

Genuinely offline

Most baby monitors send your nursery to a company's servers. HearthCam has no servers to send to. The camera phone runs a small, private web server and the viewer connects straight to it over your home Wi-Fi. No account, no login, no cloud storage, no subscription — and no way for footage to leave the house.

No Wi-Fi? Still works.

Switch on hotspot mode and the camera phone becomes its own network. A cabin in the woods, a campsite, a hotel room, the back of a car, a house with the power just back on — if the two phones can see each other, the monitor works. Bluetooth is there as a further fallback for audio.

Set up in five seconds

Install HearthCam on both phones. Pick which one is the camera. Scan the QR code from the other. That's the whole setup — no wiring, no app account, no router configuration. The pairing key rotates every night.

Everything a good monitor does

• Live video with real night mode, 720p and adaptive quality

• A live sound meter, and crying alerts that buzz your phone

• Two-way talk — soothe from the next room without opening the door

• Motion detection with a watch zone you draw around the crib, so the curtains and the fan stop waking you

• Background sound: rain, brown noise, a 62 bpm heartbeat, eight lullabies — volume capped at a level that's safe a metre from a crib

• A night light you control from bed, warm amber through deep red, with a twenty-minute sunset fade

• Audio-only mode that sips about 1.4% battery an hour with the screen off

• A timeline of the night — wakes, motion, how long they slept — kept on your phone only

• Several rooms at once, using any spare Android as another camera

Honest about batteries

Streaming all night needs a charger, so HearthCam says so plainly. It warns you when the camera phone is running warm or getting low, offers to drop to 480p to cool down, and — importantly — buzzes your viewer the moment the camera goes quiet. Silence is never mistaken for calm.

A good second life for an old phone
That drawer phone with the cracked screen still has a working camera and microphone. Give it a job.

No ads. No analytics. No Wi-Fi. No internet permission needed beyond your local network. HearthCam collects nothing, because there is nowhere for it to send anything.