Ecobee Doorbell -> HA Homekit -> doorbell entity -> Frigate | go2rtc

Third party integrations
1

Hi all, I’ve been moderately successful at using HA over the last 2 years or so. I have a rpi install of HA. I’ve recently setup Frigate as a container on a different host (i5 nuc, coral usb) to capture video camera feeds, and have them visible in HA via the Frigate addon in a dashboard using the Advanced Camera Card.

I’ve recently paired my Ecobee doorbell via homekit integration in HA and a camera entity has been created: camera.front_door_camera_rtp_stream_0.

I can view the camera stream using an Advanced Camera Card in HA, although the resolution and framerate is low/poor. Before I work too much on the quality issue I would like to configure Frigate to use the camera stream from HA so I can record / use the detection features. I would then add the video stream from Frigate to the HA dashboard.

So far it seems I should be able to use go2rtc configuration in Frigate to set the HA homekit paired camera as a source:

Utilizing the haas source from GitHub - AlexxIT/go2rtc at v1.9.2

I’ve attempted this Frigate config:

go2rtc:
  hass:
    config: "/config"
  streams:
    generic_camera: hass:camera.front_door_camera_rtp_stream_0

But this integration doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems to assume Frigate can directly see the configuration in HA. As my HA and Frigate installs are on separate hosts this doesn’t seem like the right solution, and I’ve integrated Frigate in HA, but not HA in Frigate.

Any pointers would be great.

Thanks

2

I was researching whether or not I could use the Ecobee doorbell in Frigate and came across this post and that documentation and find it confusing as well.

It only seems like go2rtc would be able to see the config path if it was installed as a Home Assistant add-on, but the same documentation says skip this setting if you Hass Add-on user.

I have both Home Assistant and Frigate installed on the same host in dockers, so I think I’ll try adding the Home Assistant config path as a path in the Frigate docker once I have the camera. But if they’re on separate hosts, I’m not sure how this would work other than mirroring the config folder.

Another option might be adding the camera directly to go2rtc with HomeKit, but then I suspect you’d lose the other benefits of the HomeKit integration in Home Assistant.

Edit: I found this issue where someone attempted my first approach, adding the config path to Frigate’s docker. Sounds like it should work, but it may not if Frigate isn’t using the host network.

3

I was able to get go2rtc to see the Home Assistant configuration by adding the Home Assistant config folder to Frigate’s docker as /hass_config and updating the go2rtc config to use /hass_config instead of /config.

But I’m seeing the same issues as @steve_d1 with the stream itself. It shows up in Home Assistant, but it appears to be a series of snapshots rather than a true camera stream. All of my other cameras load with video controls, but the Ecobee doorbell does not. Additionally, ffmpeg fails to process the stream in Frigate (added using hass:CameraName).

4

How did you get your ecobee doorbell into HA, I’m having trouble.

5

I have a similar issue trying to get the video doorbell to appear in homekit. Using Homekit Controller I connected the device to Home Assistant. Stream works there (oddly no thumbnail though) but the stream doesn’t work (but it tries to load) in HomeKit.