Frigate NVR in-action with Home Assistant

C

Cold-Lemonade

Pulling my weight
Apr 1, 2021
163
135
Boston
I am a big fan of Frigate NVR and its integration with Home Assistant. The video below was taken by one of my cameras and demonstrates the power of this system.

For some context, this camera is on the front of my brownstone which sits about 16 feet back from the sidewalk and up about 10 feet from grade. I define two zones in the camera's field of view using Frigate. When Frigate detects a person entering the first zone, Home Assistant turns on my flood light. If Frigate detects a person entering the second zone, which is closer to the house, Home Assistant tells this camera's built-in siren to turn on.

In the video, two drunk teenagers stop in front of my house. One looks like she's going to vomit. In fact, the other girl asks her as much. Frigate detects them in the first zone and turns on the flood light. When the girl on the wall leans back, Frigate detects her in the second zone and turns on the siren. Look how fast they run.

All of this happened without my monitoring the system. I got a notification on my phone from Home Assistant that Frigate had detected a person in the flood light zone and another that Frigate had detected a person in the siren zone. By the time I looked at the cameras, they were long gone.

I would love to hear what you think.
 

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This is one of many perfect examples showing how a motion activated light does nothing - people don't even flinch. It is the audio that gets them going.

This is exactly what a pro-active surveillance system should be doing - scaring away a threat before they breach the structure. Granted they were not going toward your house, but the point is made.

This kinda thing can be done in BI as well.
 
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I agree that the flood light does nothing to deter people. In my case, it is mostly delinquent teenagers. They just ignore it. But the siren gets them moving along.
 
I see Frigate AI is using the Coral TPU.

I hope Code Project / DS can intergrate this soon into BI, hopefully with a wizard to set it up as I understand it can be a bit complex standalone. Coral has to be the biggest leap forward in running AI. Faster processing than a GPU system for only 5 watts. In an energy price crisis that's a big deal.

Only big issue atm is yoiu can't buy a Coral TPU for love nor money. Website says it's due to chip shortages. Hope this isn't to do with the China embargo on certain goods because if it is, then we're all stuffed! I say you can't buy one, that's not strictly true. There are some on ebay and some obscure sites but they're all being scalped. I think the usual price is around $59 and the scalpers are selling them for nearer to $200.
 
I was able to buy two Google Coral TPUs in usb form factor on Amazon from third-party sellers for about $130 each. That's nearly twice the price Google was charging before the pandemic. I hear it is caused by chip shortage too, but this chip shortage has been going on for two years--what is going on??? They were not hard to set up in Ubuntu. This AI technology isn't perfect, but it is advancing fast. I am sure there will be better AI devices for this sort of thing in a few years.
 
Coral TPU is coming back into stock at many places, I pre-ordered mine mid November and got it delivered 1st week of January. I ended up getting dual TPU in form of a pci-e card that I plug into a M.2 slot. The problem is frigate itself, what an awful thing to configure and troubleshoot. I would not even consider it alpha at this stage, but it is a nice proof of concept.
 
@mephisto_uk Frigate does require a bit of knowledge about Linux to set up. But I consider myself a newbie and got it working. The discussion forum for Frigate on Github is very active and you can get a lot of help there.

Also, I believe version 0.12 will be released soon. From everything I've heard, its capabilities will be noticeably better.
 
I'm testing the beta version, it got much better than the previous version, it is now useable I would say. Before that, I was getting all sort of problems with recordings and playback inside HomeAssistant. I'll give it a go again when I get some decent dahua cameras to replace my unifi protect cameras.
 
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