Control Camera Lights, Locks, Garage Doors, etc

[broyuken]

Is it already possible to, or could it be added in the future, to be able to add entities from HA, or elsewhere into frigate?

My thought process is, if I’m watching a live camera feed of my driveway it would be great to be able to open or close the garage doors, or toggle the driveway lights from that feed.

If I’m having a 2 way conversation on my doorbell, it would be great if I could unlock the front door while talking to them.

This could probably be easily achieved by creating a long lived token in HA and pulling in entities from HA. Then perhaps there could be a handful of slots in the feed that could be configured to toggle those entities.

I’m not trying to make a dashboard out of frigate, but a couple of controls would go a long way to making frigate a one stop shop instead of having to stop the feed to go into HA just to unlock the door.

[hawkeye217]

In general, the recommendation is to use Home Assistant with the Advanced Camera Card connected to your Frigate instance for applications such as this. Unlocking doors and running automations are not typical actions of an NVR, and replicating functionality that Home Assistant already does very well isn't something we'd be looking to implement.

[broyuken]

I agree that they are not functions of a typical NVR, but the ring app for example does this with certain devices.

The frigate camera card is fine even though it is slow to load, but the frigate interface is significantly more user friendly.

[NickM-27]

Frigate is an NVR, not a home automation dashboard. There are many ways around this based on what you want to accomplish, including putting the Frigate UI into home assistant, but I don't think this is something that makes sense for Frigate, as Frigate is not a smart home app

[broyuken]

I disagree with this decision, but it’s not my app so I guess I have no say here. Being able to toggle the lights or unlock a door while in a live stream would be a huge win for frigate. This is something that most other dedicated camera apps can do today.