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?
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…
- 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…
- 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!
- The Coral TPU is pretty much mandatory on a RPi4, but there are other options on more powerful hardware, including GPU-based object detection
- 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.
Thank you @daern ! Do you have any camera recommendations to advise? I am quite lost when looking at all the hikvision models!
Hi daern, do you know if the bug meaning you have to stay on 8.5 is fixed now?
I’m afraid that I’ve long since moved of the RPi and onto an Intel box with a bit more horsepower, so can’t comment on this. I do know that various workarounds went into ffmpeg to sort this, but none of them were as CPU-efficient as the original solution before it was broken by RPi firmware.