Frigate on/off

[marcohildebrandtmail-hub]

Frigate constantly generates network and CPU load. I only need it for face recognition, and that should only happen when a person is actually present. My Reolink camera already reports person detections, so ideally Frigate should only activate at that moment. After some time, I would like to deactivate it again.

Is there any way to turn Frigate—or at least the camera stream—on and off? I only found options to disable motion recordings, but the stream itself stays active and the camera continues sending data to Frigate all the time.

[NickM-27]

Frigate does not use proprietary camera events to turn streams on and off. It needs to have an active stream to detect people and subsequently run face recognition

[marcohildebrandtmail-hub]

Okay, the only option I have is to disable the add-on in Home Assistant and turn it on again based on an external event

[NickM-27]

You can disable the camera itself using the camera turn on / off action. But the startup latency will be too high to get face images most likely

[marcohildebrandtmail-hub]

In my use case, I have the time. How can I turn the camera on and off? Do you have a YAML example?

[hawkeye217]

Use the camera.turn_on and camera.turn_off actions in Home Assistant. Some have had issues with turning on an unavailable entity, so you may just want to use MQTT to do it: https://docs.frigate.video/integrations/mqtt/#frigatecamera_nameenabledset

For example:

automation:
  - alias: "Turn Front Door Camera On"
    trigger:
      - platform: time
        at: "08:00:00"
    action:
      - service: mqtt.publish
        data:
          topic: "frigate/front_door/enabled/set"
          payload: "ON"

[NickM-27]

Using the Frigate integration

action: camera.turn_off
target:
  entity_id: camera.front_cam
data: {}