Home Assistant + Frigate

Home Assistant

Home Assistant runs on the homelab and controls everything that plugs in: lights, switches, sensors, and automations.

It replaces the proprietary apps that come with each device. Instead of five different apps for five different brands, there’s one dashboard. Automations work across brands — motion sensor from one brand can trigger lights from another.

The setup is straightforward: Zigbee USB dongle for most devices, a few Wi-Fi ones that don’t have alternatives, and Home Assistant handles the protocol translation.

Frigate

Frigate is the camera system. It does object detection directly on the camera feeds — people, dogs, cars — and only alerts when something relevant happens.

The detection runs locally, not in the cloud. That means:

• No monthly subscription for smart detection
• No video footage leaving the network
• Alerts are instant — there’s no round-trip to a server

It uses hardware acceleration where possible and falls back to CPU otherwise. The detection is good enough that false positives are rare — it distinguishes between people, animals, and vehicles without much tuning.

How They Work Together

Home Assistant listens to Frigate events and triggers automations:

• Person detected at the front door → lights turn on, camera feed shows on the TV
• Car detected in the driveway → notify that we’re home
• No motion for X hours → cameras switch to low-frame-rate mode

The camera system feeds into the homelab’s observability stack too — uptime, storage usage, and detection accuracy all show up in Grafana.

What’s Running

• Several IP cameras around the house
• Zigbee sensors (motion, door, temperature)
• Smart lights and switches
• Frigate with object detection models
• Home Assistant as the orchestrator

It’s not the most sophisticated setup, but it’s the kind of thing that makes you forget about the infrastructure until something goes wrong. And when it does, at least I can fix it.