Starting to think about setting up my home camera surveillance system and what to avoid making poor decisions, so need to tap into community experience … you guys :-)
Frigate seems like the direction to take if I want to strike a good balance between cost, integration and reliability. Hardware is a key issues. I could install HA and Frigate on my VM running on my Truenas server but I feel I’m putting all my eggs in one basket so thinking of having a dedicated machine for HA + Frigate. The Frigate website advertises this little beasts with a Coral PCIe unit. That about 300€ if I’m lucky, but I could live with that.
For camera I definitely do not want chinese-call-home/cheap stuff. The Lorytas advertised on the Frigate website seem to be difficult to get hold of (are these not chinese btw?) in Europe so was wondering what other peoples experience is. Cameras need to be comparable to these Lorytas in terms of quality and functionality (no chinese, no call home, good image quality, good relibility, weather proof)
Keen to hear whether others have tried the hardware/setup recomended on the Frigate website and whether there are people out there that have actually got even better setups.
This guy is recommending that the Frigate unit is separate from the HA unit. I’m unlikely to have more than 5 cameras installed and it feels a bit overkill to have two separate machines?
Not really an answer, more of a related question to others:
Zoneminder… how does that compare?
It seems to have been around for years (I was made aware of it as an addon for MythTV), is still maintained and ticks the usual FOSS boxes… and has an HA integration.
But I’ve not heard many people using it…?
Ah yes, thanks for raising. I had forgotten. So we have three Foss contenders:
- Frigate
- Motioneye
- Zoneminder I’ve only tried ME about 6 years ago with RPi camera. It was alright but I’m sure things have moved on.
This might not answer all of your questions and I only have very small number of cameras, but I would recommend to buy any IP Camera that supports RTSP and then create a seperate VLAN or LAN for the cameras to not be able to phone home or anywhere else. I actually have a complete isolated smarthome network using a opnsense Router and it works Quite well and at least feels safe.
Another way could be to invest in unifi / ubiquiti cameras, they have a good Reputation. Integration in frigate or homeassistant I dont know.
I’ll hop on this. I lot of the cheaper cameras ONLY have cloud connectivity, which is not what you want. You specifically need to look for RTSP cameras, and shy away from any that are overpriced because they provide “AI” bullshit onboard. You can use Frigate to do inference to detect objects and events if you wish, so don’t by the default of having that on the camera.
Edge AI inference is very valuable, just not in this context.
It never really is in most contexts though 🤣
True, especially if it’s oriented at a consumer and not commercial.
Yip, I already have pfSense installed with an isolated virtual network just for my home automation.
I was not impressed with Frigate, even Coral accelerated. I have a USB one I can sell you wayyyyyyyyy cheaper.
Are you able to expand? What exactly did not impress you? Motioneye (which I briefly used 3-4 years ago with a dodge camera) and Frigate seem to be those that are used mostly as OOS solutions and hooked up to either OpenHab or HA.
For some context I have been running my own Linux servers for 20+ years, I have used Home Assistant since very early in in the development when everything was yaml configuration, and I have experience with ffmpeg command line configuration. This is not the typical experience for me with an early in development roll your own software solution.
It may have changed now but the horrible configuration system is first and foremost what I did not like. But before I go into detail on that, I did not think the recognition features worked well enough to justify the struggle with the ever changing yaml settings. And I certainly was not impressed enough by any of it to start a subscription.
My experience with the configuration is probably through the first year after it was released so keep that in mind. I had a lot of trouble with getting it to even recognize the feeds from my camera in order to analyze them. Through the period I used Frigate this became a regular battle. I would finally get the new yaml config sorted out, and then the config file format would change and I would have to try and figure out what settings I needed to adjust now or where to put them in order for it to just read my camera feeds. These were nothing special, just a normal rtsp feed that I could easily view from a phone or desktop app. Eventually on the 4th or 5th time the config changes broke my setup I just gave up.
The recognition from the default models was not anywhere near useful enough for me to justify the struggle. And with no guarantee that I could keep this working with my cameras there was absolutely no way I would pay for access to a better model.
I would say if you use it, do not use any camera other than what they recommend because if the configuration changes and you’re not using those you have to figure it out yourself.
At the very least I would try it with one camera for a while maybe on the paid model as a trial. I wouldn’t invest heavily and assume it’s going to work or be stable.
I know many people have a good experience with Frigate so definitely listen to other people’s takes. But it just took up far too much of my time to be seen as anything other than an annoyance.
Thankyou for taking the time to explain. I was in fact going to get one Loryta cameras recomended by the Frigate website … If i can even find it in EU. Don’t want to pay the premium import taxes 😉
