Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:
- Something interesting that happened to you
- Something humourous that happened to you
- Something frustrating that happened to you
- A quick question
- A request for recommendations
- Pictures of your pet
- A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
So how’s it going?
Actually on cameras, I think Ubiquiti are adding Onvif support to Protect which should let you add non-Ubiquiti cameras to their setup too. Of course then you won’t get the special detection features so i’ll continue to use frigate & offload the “is human?” analysis to a GPU.
I’ve been looking at Reolink with built in detection. Would I still need frigate?
I’d want it integrated with Home Assistant anyway, so might not even need Unifi Protect in the stack.
I really like the frigate project, and the detection models it has are really really good, and that meant I could use really cheap Amcrest (I think) cameras because the brains was on the server end rather than camera end. Plus I kinda prefer the device side to be as dumb as possible as they can often have all sorts of vulnerabilities baked in the more IoT they are.
Though I also really hate Home Assistant so I use Frigate as a standalone app, and I manage notifications in a somewhat roundabout way (mqtt -> loki -> grafana -> pushover). I did that because I got heartily sick of how awful Home Assistant was at determining whether I was, or was not at home.
So now I use Unpoller to get my device states from the UDM, that gets stored in prometheus, and my Grafana alert rule works out if my partner or I are at home based on our device being connected to the WiFi or not; then each MQTT event for a detection it only sends a notification if both phones are away.
Haha I fought with Home Assistant on the home/not home thing too. It’s really food now, though. I think the issue is HA uses the google significant motion update, so it doesn’t get realtime location data but instead updates on some black box google schedule. They have a high accuracy mode but it still doesn’t seem to poll regularly. It’s unclear to me exactly what changes.
On my phone I also use PhoneTrack synced to Nextcloud for location tracking, and that updates every minute. I think this seems to allow HA to get more frequent updates, as it works great for me now. Still a massive problem on my wife’s phone, who has no need for PhoneTrack. Detecting WiFi network is my next plan for her, which you can do in HA as well.