Frigate + Coral USB + Rpi 4 2Gb

1

Hi everyone,
I already have Home Assistant running on a raspberry Pi 4 (2Gb RAM). I am willing to have three outdoor security cameras analyzed realtime connected via local Onvif. Is it a good configuration to keep this hardware and just buy a Coral USB ? Or shall I buy a new hardware?

2

I have 6 cameras running on a Pi4 (4GB) with Frigate + Coral USB and it works fine but there’s quite a few caveats here…

  1. You need to use hardware video decoding if possible. This is currently broken in the latest version of HAOS due to a kernel update back in the summer, but if you’re willing to run HAOS 8.5 it works fine. There is a fix in the works however…
  2. I’ve tuned my cameras quite carefully, so am using secondary (or tertiary!) streams configured for 720p / 5fps (which is all you really need to object detection). This makes a massive difference to the initial motion detection workload which is done entirely in CPU on the RPi. Likewise I tuned the cameras to output using a video encoding that the RPi can definitely decode in hardware - no h.265 here!
  3. The Coral TPU is pretty much mandatory on a RPi4, but there are other options on more powerful hardware, including GPU-based object detection
  4. For me, with all of the above, I see about 25-30% CPU utilisation on the RPi, including HA, which I’m quite happy with

Good luck. For me, at least, the improvement over the stock (Hikvision) in-camera motion detection is enormous.

3

Thank you @daern ! Do you have any camera recommendations to advise? I am quite lost when looking at all the hikvision models!

4

Hi daern, do you know if the bug meaning you have to stay on 8.5 is fixed now? :slight_smile: