I’m looking into self hosted and open source nvr options and frigate looks like the right fit for me. I’m curious what hardware others are running it on and how many cameras they have. How many people are running it in home assistsnt?
I’ve got 3 Wyze cam v3s running the wyze mini hacks firmware sectioned off in a VLAN that can only reach Frigate (no internet).
I have frigate running on a cheap Lenovo M900 I got on ebay for $65 that has an i7 and 8gb of memory and it actually does fairly well without the Google coral USB TPU as long as that was the only service on that system. Trying to run Frigate on my NUC with other services without a TPU caused some issues with CPU usage but with a TPU I would bet it’ll all run on the one system.
Home assistant works exceptionally well for notifying, one of my cameras I have on UDP since the signal isn’t great and get a couple artifacts that trip it up but other than that it has been much quicker to notify and more reliable than anything in the consumer market I’ve tried so far.
I would add, Corral TPU is nearly essential. But do not forgot about video decoding acceleration. I’m running couple of 4k H.265 cameras without HW acceleration, and ffmpeg consumes good amount of CPU out of my Ryzen 3600. So pick hardware which can decode streams from your cameras.
I have it running in a Dell Optiplex that I bought used with an i7-4790 and a Coral Mini-PCIe. I had to buy an adapter for the Mini-PCIe, but that depends on your motherboard.
I only have 2 cameras – a 1080p Amcrest wifi cam, and a 4MP Amcrest wired camera. For the 4MP camera, I use a lower resolution sub-stream for motion detection, because motion detection is CPU only. Once Frigate detects motion, it then sends everything to the Coral for object detection. That’s my understanding, at least.
Frigate is wonderful.
4 2K cameras running in an RPi 4 container. I do have a coral TPU so that helps offload a great deal of the processing. Runs great! I use the add on HA for the integration only.
The hardware isn’t super important if you can get a Google Coral TPU. You can run Frigate on a Raspberry Pi that way. Without the TPU, it can be fairly CPU intensive.
I run Frigate on an old laptop and before the TPU it would run really hot. After it runs much cooler.
