Ive setup 2 HA tests on Ubuntu and Hassabian and still I just cant get this to work. The OpenAlpr Image processing always shows unknown but the build it tests (wget http://plates.openalpr.com/ea7the.jpg alpr -c us ea7the.jpg) work perfectly.
Would just like to know if anyone has any pointers or tips as to what caught them on setup
Did you purchase a subscription/plan from ALPR? Can’t remember where I saw this, but I believe I’ve read somewhere (a long time ago, things might have changed) that you needed a basic or pro plan, free plans were note supported
The docs dont say anything about a subscription for a local processing.
For local processing you don’t need a subscription, the alpr cloud service is more accurate in plate detection … but isn’t a free service.
My tests with ALPR were not good, probably I did not know how to correctly configure the type of plate in my country and the angle of my camera.
Did you ever get it working though?
I know it needs quite abit of horsepower to run it locally but I can assigned plenty to the VM.
Cloud service worked fine for me, but the 2000 free credit get used up very quickly, and the next tier is very expensive for a small home project.
Yes, I get it working but in “labs” mode, never with my security videocameras.
Sorry, what is labs mode?
only for test
Ahh ok. So back to my previous assumption. Noone has ever got this working in production.
someone made the component so it has obviously worked for him/her at least at that time.
I’ve just repurposed an old PC to for CCTV video processing and will probably have another dab at OpenALPR. I’ll post here my findings
I’ll happily give $10 to anyone that can help me getting it working on my side.
$20? Any takers?
somehow I also cant get this working.
I installed OpenALPR.
The command line in the HA documents that needs to be ran via cmake wont work for me.
However if I run the wget command it does recognize the pictures.
So the install is ok
Installing the cloud version works like a charm, but does quickly run out of free credits, so thats not an option.
FYI:
anyone else getting error like this?
2019-07-17 21:39:40 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.helpers.entity] Update for image_processing.openalpr_side fails
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/src/app/homeassistant/helpers/entity.py", line 220, in async_update_ha_state
await self.async_device_update()
File "/usr/src/app/homeassistant/helpers/entity.py", line 375, in async_device_update
await self.async_update()
File "/usr/src/app/homeassistant/components/image_processing/__init__.py", line 132, in async_update
await self.async_process_image(image.content)
File "/usr/src/app/homeassistant/components/openalpr_local/image_processing.py", line 187, in async_process_image
stdout, _ = await alpr.communicate(input=image)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/asyncio/subprocess.py", line 187, in communicate
loop=self._loop)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/asyncio/subprocess.py", line 138, in _feed_stdin
self.stdin.write(input)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/asyncio/streams.py", line 305, in write
self._transport.write(data)
File "uvloop/handles/stream.pyx", line 671, in uvloop.loop.UVStream.write
File "uvloop/handles/handle.pyx", line 159, in uvloop.loop.UVHandle._ensure_alive
RuntimeError: unable to perform operation on <WriteUnixTransport closed=True reading=False 0x7f3274682ba8>; the handler is closed
Sorry for going back a month, but I’ve just started investigating OpenALPR and I’m puzzled by your “quickly run out of free credits” comment. I see the free tier gives you 1000 “recognitions” a month. I can’t imagine ever needing more than this for my driveway use case, as I can’t believe familiy + visitors + deliveries is ever going to approach that 32 a day. Have I misunderstood how this works?
Richard,
From what I understand in the documentation and also from testign experience.
If you keep the configuration as per default it will do api call every 12 seconds.
There is a possibility to only do a api-call depending on e.g. a motion sensor.
I haven’t tried this yet, since I don’t have a motion sensor installed.
Ah, OK. Thanks for that. It seems like they are using rather misleading language if by “recognitions” they really mean “API calls”! My plan was to try having calls as a result of movement alerts from my Blue Iris camera monitoring software, so this might still work for me.
Having said that, I’d prefer to run it locally, but I don’t currently have the processing power. Might need to get a Pi 4 earlier rather than later!
Thanks for your response.
I set this up last night. Had a look today have gone through all my 1000 free calls. Still don’t have any detections listed as it used them all last night when no one was driving around.
I’m not sure how this works. Does it send every frame? If so, that’s annoying.
What is the status now, how it would be possible to use local (free) option in HA?
I have seen https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openalpr_local/ but I have no idea how to even “get alpr commadline tool”