I’m fairly new to HA. I’m running on a HA Green (4GB LPDDR3x /
Rockchip RK3566 SoC / quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU). At the moment I’ve only really integrated with Alexa, numerous smart plugs, my wall switch lighting and various smart devices. I’m in the midst of rebuilding part of my house and I want to put in cameras which will work with HA.
I’d like to get a camera covering the door, one covering the drive, one with a narrow focus on an alley by the side of the house and one for the back garden. I’m not too bothered about 100% coverage.
I can run Cat 6e to any point with relative ease, which I understand will power most cameras. I’d like a system which will record and have some AI detection but the number of options is utterly bewildering. Budget not a huge concern and I’d like something that is decent quality but I’m not looking to spend money for the sake of it. Any pointers?
First thing is running cameras and having AI detection is very likely to overwhelm your HA green. Even just having live camera feeds may cause issues especially if they are 4k. So you need to be aware of this.
As for a camera setup, there really is only one way to do this, Frigate.
This will do everything you want with full compatibility with HA, plenty of support etc. Get any camera that puts out an RTSP feed. You will need a tpu like google coral to run it though, and probably another more powerful server.
Fair enough. So what is the best way to take the load off the HA green? Four cameras linked on their own switch via Cat 6e to a NAS or a mini-PC, which could then process the feeds from Frigate and record the feeds onto a seperate HD and send MQTT messages to HA for automations? Any recommendations for the hardware?
As I understand it, I can go for any camera which does RTSP/ONVIF streams (some of which deliver sub-streams at a lower res for AI detection). So there should be options there, although specific recommendations would be appreciated.
I’ve seen Frigate mentioned several times and this seems to be a must for automation purposes.
On a budget I would look at things like the Dell OptiPlex 3060 Micro that are ex business models sold cheap after being refurbed.
I currently use a synology NAS as my camera host through synology surveliance center since at the time its what I had on hand and use hikvision and hilook cameras with internet access for them disabled.
You may well be able to run frigate on your green, it was designed to run on a pi I believe but that was some time ago, so not sure anymore. You will need the coral though. I run it on an hp g8 min with i5 cpu. I have run it in the past on an HPT630.
I use cheap generic 1080p cameras from Aliexpress as they were only £20 each, I have 3 outside, and 3 in the outbuildings, there are also 4 birdbox cameras. You can spend a lot of cash but to get a usable CCTV system you don’t need to.