Raspberry Pi Security Camera/NVR with Frigate

What Frigate Actually Does

Frigate is a local NVR (network video recorder) that does real-time object detection (person, car, animal, package) on your camera feeds, so you get meaningful notifications instead of "something moved" alerts from raw motion detection. Everything runs locally — no cloud subscription.

Hardware Reality Check

A Pi 4/5 alone will really struggle with more than 1-2 camera streams doing detection — the CPU chokes fast. Two realistic paths:

Add a Coral USB Accelerator (~$60, Google's TPU) — offloads the actual ML inference, and a Pi 4/5 can then handle 4-6 cameras comfortably.
Skip the Pi entirely for this one — Frigate runs great in Docker on an old mini-PC or NAS with more CPU headroom, if you have one lying around. The Pi is genuinely the wrong tool without the Coral.

Install (Docker Compose)

services: frigate: image: ghcr.io/blakeblackshear/frigate:stable privileged: true devices: - /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb # Coral USB volumes: - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro - ./config:/config - ./storage:/media/frigate - type: tmpfs target: /tmp/cache tmpfs: size: 1000000000 ports: - "5000:5000" - "8554:8554" - "8555:8555/tcp" - "8555:8555/udp"

Camera Config Basics

Frigate wants an RTSP stream per camera. Most modern IP cameras expose this natively — check the manufacturer's RTSP URL format (commonly rtsp://user:pass@camera-ip:554/stream1). In config/config.yml, define each camera with its RTSP URL, a detect resolution (lower = faster, 720p is usually plenty for detection even if you record at higher res), and which objects to alert on.

Home Assistant Integration

Install the Frigate integration in HA and you get camera entities, person/car detection binary sensors, and snapshot images you can use in automations — "notify me with a photo when a person is detected at the front door" becomes a five-line automation.

Storage Planning

Continuous recording eats disk fast. Set record.retain.days conservatively and lean on Frigate's event-based clips (only saves footage around detected objects) rather than 24/7 continuous recording unless you specifically need it for a NVR replacement.

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