Frigate - Camera - En/Disable motion detection?

Third party integrations
1

What is the Camera Enable (or Disable) motion detection action supposed to do?

Is this trying to talk to the hardware motion detection onboard the cameras, or the Frigate (0.15.0) motion detection setting for the camera, or?

I can toggle motion detection for cameras within Frigate live view with one of the four icons in the upper right corner, but I don’t see any response to the Camera Enable (or Disable) motion detection action within Home Assistant using the Frigate 5.9.2 integration.

Home Assistant is getting occupancy and detection counts, live views and snapshots from Frigate, but it seems like communication from Home Assistant to Frigate might be blocked?

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

2

if you are referring to the camera entity provided by the frigate integration, then it toggles Frigate’s motion detection

3

That’s what I thought it should do. But it isn’t doing it for my setup. I have a mosquitto instance in a docker container and both Frigate and the HA MQTT integration are pointed at it, I think it’s working because of all the Frigate stuff reaching HA, but I’m not sure I have any HA signals reaching Frigate.

4

seems likely to be an MQTT issue then, I just tested and it is working correctly for me. Whenever you toggle it you should also see the motion toggle entity change as well

5

Well, wait a minute… In the Frigate Camera page Configuration card, that Detect toggle does link with the Frigate Live view of the Camera’s detect control, changes on one are immediately reflected on the other.

What isn’t working for me are two automations I made that are supposed to turn off detection at sunset and turn it back on at sunrise. Manually Running the actions of those automations is what isn’t working… Not with the camera device, not with the entity, not with both selected in the “Then do”:

alias: Frigate - Birdhouse disable detection sunset
description: ""
triggers:
  - trigger: sun
    event: sunset
    offset: 0
conditions: []
actions:
  - action: camera.disable_motion_detection
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: camera.birdhouse
      device_id: 44cdefcdebabedfabcdefabaaafcabab
mode: single
6

So to be clear, motion detection and object detection are two different things. If you have object detection enabled then disabling motion detection will fail, since motion detection is required for object detection.

If your goal is just to disable object detection then you should use the switch.turn_off service

7

Yeah, o.k. I get the logic, I don’t get the silent failure and I don’t see how to “do it right” under the graphic editor. Can you suggest proper .yaml?

The goal is to switch off detection because after dark this camera “sparkles” and sends constant motion detection notices all over the screen to the system, so rather than burning energy analyzing all that noise I’d just like to turn detection off for the night. Obviously, I’m not expecting object detection to work with no motion triggers coming through - so object detection can be on, off, whatever makes it happy.

8

Use the switch.turn_off to disable object and motion detection. This can be configured using the UI

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9

O.K. that works - thanks!

Gotta say, it’s a little counter-intuitive to have that under Switch instead of Camera, particularly when Camera is there with a Motion Detect setting that doesn’t do what you’d expect.

10

Home assistant doesn’t have a camera.turn_off object detection switch, so that is not something Frigate controls.

There is also a motion detection switch on the camera, but the camera motion detection switches is something that is offered for all camera entities, so we implemented it in case a user decides to use it instead.

11

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