Frigate is one of the most popular NVR utilities out there, and for good reason. It has terrific motion detection provisions, works with most AI accelerators, and offers a clean UI to monitor your camera feed – all while running on low-power devices like the Raspberry Pi. While Frigate can utilize the WebPush protocol to send notifications to web browsers, it may seem too rudimentary when you’ve got a home lab armed to the teeth with cool self-hosted services.

But if you’ve got a Home Assistant server, you can create an automation to get notified as soon as Frigate detects motion in your security cameras. The best part? Thanks to a certain blueprint, you don’t have to spend hours creating the right YAML script for the automation!

What you’ll need for this project

As you may have already guessed from the title and intro, a Home Assistant server and a Frigate instance lie at the heart of this project. However, you don’t need to deploy them on the same machine. Technically, you could even have containerized versions of both services, but if you haven’t already set up the Home Assistant Community Store, I recommend deploying HASS in a virtual machine/bare-metal configuration. That way, you’ll have a relatively painless experience setting up HACS.

Since the Frigate Notifications blueprint also requires a mobile device, you’ll have to install the Home Assistant application on your smartphone and hook it up to your HASS instance. Finally, you’ll need to enable alerts inside the Frigate server. You’ll find the toggle for enabling alerts within the Camera Settings tab of the Settings page in Frigate’s web UI.

Installing Home Assistant Community Store

Once you’ve got both HASS and Frigate up and running, it’s time to head to the former’s UI. We’ll be relying on the Frigate integration for this project, which isn’t natively available on Home Assistant. Thankfully, HACS includes this integration, and you’ll have to deploy the Community Store before you can connect Frigate with HASS. To do so,

1. Open the official HACS page within your web browser and use it to add the Community Store to your Home Assistant server’s integration repository.
2. Press Add when Home Assistant displays the Missing add-on repository notification.
3. Once the Get HACS add-on appears in Home Assistant, click on Install and hit Start. You can check the HACS installation progress inside the Log tab.
4. When HACS is finished installing, click on the Developer Tools tab and press Restart under the Check and restart section.
5. After your Home Assistant server reboots, click on Settings and choose Devices & services.
6. Press the Add Integration button and tap HACS.
7. Enable the toggles for each option and hit the Submit button.
8. Next, you'll need to pair your HACS instance with your GitHub account. You can do so by entering your account details and typing the code from the Integrations tab inside the GitHub window.

Setting up the Frigate integration

Now that you’ve finished setting up HACS, it’s time to configure the Frigate integration.

1. Switch to the newly added HACS tab, use the Search bar to find the Frigate integration, and use the Download button to add it to your Home Assistant server.
2. Click on the Settings tab, hit the Download Required option, and press Submit.
3. When your HASS server reboots, head to the Devices & services tab within Settings.
4. Click on Add integration and select Frigate.
5. Enter the IP address of your Frigate server and uncheck the Validate SSL option. Remember to enter the Username and Password fields before tapping Submit.
6. If you’ve entered the correct details, the camera name will pop up as one of the Devices, and you can hit Finish to add the integration to your Home Assistant dashboard.

Configuring the Frigate Notification blueprint

By now, you’ve connected Frigate with Home Assistant, and all that’s left is setting up notifications for your surveillance system. We’ll rely on the Frigate Notification for the alerts, and setting it up is fairly simple. All you have to do is:

1. Head to the Settings tab yet again and choose Automations & scenes.
2. Switch to the Blueprints tab, press Import Blueprint, and enter the following URL before hitting the Preview button.

   https://github.com/SgtBatten/HA_blueprints/blob/main/Frigate_Camera_Notifications/Stable.yaml

3. Scroll down inside the new window and press Import Blueprint.
4. Choose the Camera Devices, add the Mobile device where you wish to receive the notifications, enter the IP address of the Home Assistant interface as the Base URL, and hit Save.
5. Choose your preferred Name for the automation and tap Rename.

Integrate your surveillance system into your Home Assistant workflow

If you’ve configured everything correctly, the automation will become active, and you’ll receive alerts in your Home Assistant interface and on your mobile device whenever Frigate detects motion on your security cameras. When that happens, the Frigate Notification automation will generate a Trace graph detailing the timeline, logbook entries, and variables of the entire process.

For folks who want more granular control over their alerts, you can use the Notification customizations tab to set even more trigger-action conditions for the automation.