Adding Video to HA (/Frigate - w/Coral Accelerator?)

Configuration
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I have a feeling this may make a lot of people laugh, but… asking for guidance (an d going to do alot of research first, any links with information would be deeply appreciated) -

I have a RPI 4B w/8Gig of RAM running Home Assistant Supervised with no MicroSD Card - totelly running on a 1TB SSD. I have it tweaked to perfection - nearly. I have about 125 devices running connected to HA. Note the typical CPU and RAM usage:

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I am now considering getting video cameras and adding in the Frigate integration. I do not want to overwhelm this tiny RPI 4B device as I have worked very carefully to ensure everything is working very well.

Therefore I am asking (and yes I may upgrade to an Intel NUC) - in my situation would this still be tenable and run very well to have a coral USB acelerator on the RPI and use a couple cameras with Frigate in this setup - or am I really asking for trouble at this point unless I upgrade the main hardware first? And what is the ideal recommended Frigate setup if I want to add say - 3 or 4 cameras (currently have none)?

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Frigate’s docs have dropped any mention of the Pi4, but when it used to include it they said:

Can handle a small number of cameras

You may find that you’ll be fine, or that it spends the entire time CPU maxed and struggling.

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Thank you @Tinkerer , obviously I would need more hardware. Where is the best place to read about what other hardware I can buy which would run Frigate (and then have the frigate integration in HA on my RPI4 talk to that other machine)? (Sorry for the noob questions…)

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This is as easy as using the IP address of the frigate installation.

If you are not using a google coral then you want something that can handle the video streams on CPU power. something with intel quicksync will be a minimum to aim for.

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In the Frigate docs.

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Frigate use a lot of cpu and memory when you are using cpu detectors, at least that is my experience with it. The only way to keep it’s memory and cpu usage under control is to set limitation on container. Using coral should help, but I don’t have it.
I run frigate on my doorbell camera and it managed to crash server twice. My cpu usage is around 22 % but majority of cpu usage is frigate. Without it it will be less than 20 % percent for sure. I have more than 80 zigbee devices. Memory and cpu usage of mqtt and z2m containers is really low. Except frigate code server is another container that uses a lot of cpu and memory resources.

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@Tinkerer Sorry to not have been more clear - Is there any place in the docks where people disagree with the requirements performance-wise if I am to get the very best outcome on my config (rather than minimum requirements)? Are their certain cameras or hardware or protocols that are problematic that should be avoided?

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The official docs don’t have anything like that, they simply have guidance on how to get the best out of what you have.

  • This says to use some specific brands, and talks about buying a Coral
  • This covers camera setup, which basically boils down to H.264 and H.265

Either way, you want a camera that supports RTSP and two feeds at different resolutions, so that you can run the detection on the lower resolution stream and record the higher resolution stream.

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Thank you @Tinkerer