Home Assistant Green + Frigate + External USB Storage?

Installation
1

Hey ladies, gents, and NBs. I have a friend that has expressed interest in getting into the hobby! They’re mostly interested in setting up a Frigate NVR first and I initially thought the Home Assistant Green (are we calling that the HAG?) might be a good choice.

Some preliminary reading though makes it unclear what OS the green is even running. Is it Debian underneath or HAOS? Can I even easily pass the USB device to Frigate? Any insight would be appreciated before I have him purchase hardware.

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By the way, can Frigate use the RK3566 chip as detector?

3

Really have no idea - part of the reason for posting is I don’t have a green available to me and its difficult to find out much info on it. I’d assume so it would just be kinda bad/slow? Most likely a coral TPU will need introduced at some point.

4

Ok I tentatively have something working with a VM running HassOS to represent the Home Assistant Green and here was my process in case anyone is curious:

  1. Created a USB for udev loading based on the thread located here: [SOLVED] Mount USB drive in Hassio to be used on the Media Folder with udev customization
  2. Formatted the external drive as ext4 with the label “frigate”. DO NOT PLUG INTO HASS YET (Hass will not recognize NTFS or exFAT and the udev in step one will load this drive as /media/frigate for us which will be required)
  3. Installed and setup frigate as normal
  4. Shut down frigate addon.
  5. Used root command line to “mv mnt/data/supervisor/media/frigate mnt/data/supervisor/media/frigate_tmp” (per HA Network Storage | Frigate but ignoring the network part)
  6. Plugged in the external drive (which should very shortly appear in lsblk as /mnt/data/supervisor/media/frigate).
  7. cd mnt/data/supervisor/media/frigate_tmp
  8. ls what is in this folder
  9. use mv to move it all to mnt/data/supervisor/media/frigate (rsync apparently not available)
  10. start frigate

From what I can tell frigate is now fully operating off the USB drive. Still need to stress test it and make sure it works after a restart or even an accidental disconnect of the drive.

NOTE: Do not try to do this from a terminal addon. Use SSH or command line on the physical system itself. lsblk and other important commands will not be available.

Breaking Note: make sure that line 50 of your rule file allows [a-z] rather [b-z] because home assistant green’s main drive is not sda.

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