10 Hours of AI Collaboration, 30 Mins of Dev Time: Running a Neural Network on a Thumb-Sized Microcontroller for Garage Door Recognition

To solve the problem of accidentally leaving my garage door open overnight, I collaborated with AI to build an edge neural network sensor on a thumb-sized ESP32-CAM. This article details how we completed the end-to-end telemetry loop, tackled extreme data imbalance and QAT quantization loss, and got edge AI running on a microcontroller in just 10 hours.