Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that doesn’t justify a full post. For example:
- Something interesting that happened to you
- Something humourous that happened to you
- Something frustrating that happened to you
- A quick question
- A request for recommendations
- Pictures of your pet
- A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like a hippo
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
That sounds amazing! Would that be some sort of frigate setup?
I’ve always wanted to set up something like that, where you get notified that a van is in your driveway or a person is at the door via image recognition from a security camera. But I think the hardware is a bit hard to track down, though I haven’t actually done much research towards this thing that I’ve “always wanted” 😆
There are other options. I use deepstack on my nas for object recognition so that I only get alerted by the camera if it recognises vehicles or people in our driveway
What type of hardware are you running if you don’t mind me asking?
It’s running on a 10 year old xeon. I already had Unraid running as my Nas that has a bunch of docker containers for Plex, Homeassistant, etc. Deepstack is running on there as a docker container.
FWIW, I setup my security camera 1-2 years ago, so there might be better options now. However there was also a big shortage of Coral TPU’s at the time, even though I did consider using Frigate. I ended up settling on BlueIris for recording as I wasn’t happy with what the free options offered back then. Unfortunately BlueIris is Windows only, so I picked up an ex-lease PC which runs headless just for BlueIris and storing the footage.
I’ve been thinking lately of updating the hardware in the Nas, as there is a huge performance jump if I move to one of the new Raptor/Alder lake Intel chips with quick sync, particularly for transcoding for Plex. But it’s going to be at least a couple of grand to update everything properly, which I don’t have to spend right now :(
During my research, I’ve been seeing a lot of talk around Docker. Is that sort of like in between a Venv & VM?
My understanding is that is you use a Coral TPU, it basically allows you to run things such as Image recognition on much lesser hardware than would otherwise be possible? In theory, does that mean you don’t need the top of the line everything else if you’re trying to run something like that?
I’m not going to pretend like I’m an expert at either of these. Unraid has come a long way now that installing app containers is pretty trivial. I am going to link this reddit comment that does a pretty good ELI5: Here
With the Coral, I think it’s literally the tensor processing unit (hence TPU) or coprocessor that is found usually on GPU’s for AI and machine learning. So you can use it with lower powered devices that can’t fit a discrete GPU or offload the processing to the TPU instead of using CPU/GPU. I think. Don’t quote me on that 😆
Looking at what others have done online, it seems the corals can really benefit inference speeds for image recognition. Hopefully I’ll be putting my order in to test it out :)
Honestly I just started thinking about this again yesterday so I basically know nothing lol. Though i did come across frigate, and it did make me want to try and setup a local home security system (as I’ve been meaning to get away from using a wireless one from one of the big manufacturers of such things).
I’ve been doing a bit of a dive into something called YOLOv8, which seems to be an object detection model, where you can use existing models, or train your own. Utilizing that on maybe a RPi 5 with a camera and a Google Coral (which from my understanding, supercharges your hardware’s ability to process such things), and then using the output from the model somehow to control some type of actuation (electromagnet maybe?) to lock or unlock a catflap.
Yeah I think from memory, one of the main reasons I had abandoned it last time I looked was that it was so hard to get the relevant hardware. Having a look again, it seems that most things are quite readily available now :)
Not knowing what it is, I’m not sure if using software called YOLO is advisable 😆
Oh man, don’t tell me that, now I’ll have to do it!
Haha. Though seeing as their on their 8th YOLO adventure (different versions are actually built by different people it seems), maybe they have a method to their YOLOing madness😆
You definitely shouldn’t visit mouser.com then hahaha 😆
Oh man, there seems to be ample stock!
Any suggestions for a camera? I don’t have any at the moment. One that doesn’t expose itself to the internet would be nice 😆
I’ve only been looking at the Raspberry Cams for the moment, as my thinking was that I wanted to keep all the components as compatible as possible to make my life easier.
Though for security cameras, maybe @[email protected] would have better knowledge around what is good out there?
I don’t know much about rPi specific models. For outdoor security cams I always go wired with PoE IP cams that at least have an RTSP stream, that way most standalone NVR software can work with them.
Not a fan of wireless/battery security cameras. I do have one wireless indoor cam, but it’s only to check on the toddler when she’s sleeping, it doesn’t record so no constant stream of data. I think I’m using a cheapie Amcrest out front, I haven’t really looked at cameras in awhile. Dahua’s are often recommended on places like ipcamtalk.com, but you need to look at specific models as there are a lot of them.
Did a quick look on some forums and did see a lot of mentions of Dahua. I’ll hopefully move to a a Poe setup in the near future.