Pan-gno-pticon
edit: It has come to my attention that some readers are unaware that the title is a pun. Please see the wikipedia article on the Panopticon if this includes you.
For some time, Alex Birch has been asking me to write about my camera setup, but I've been lazy because, while it's neat, I don't think it's anything too extraordinary.
I've been running Frigate for a few years now. I've used motion and zoneminder in the past, and when I set up zoneminder most recently. With that I had gotten a lot of false positives from wind at the start, but with some tuning of the monitored segments, I was able to get mostly reasonable behavior. Most of the false positives were bugs that flew near the camera. Then, Tommy told me about Frigate, and the Coral AI accelerator which let me avoid getting an expensive video card, since they were all incredibly expensive because there was a large demand in the market for crudely-drawn apes, which for whatever reason required large numbers of GPUs. Personally, in the crudely-drawn animal domain, I prefer birds.
So anyway, I set that up, it worked great. It detected cars and humans and life was good. I found it particularly enjoyable to review my neighbors comings-and-goings once I set up a camera outside my garage. If there is anything I took away from that process it is that humans are most definitely creatures of habit.
More recently, I moved into an apartment. I still have all of the frigate equipment, but no reasonable place to put a camera. I suppose I may install one pointing down into the Alleyway behind the building, but I can't say I care all that much about what's happening down there when it's 40 feet below me. Also, I live in a highly dense mixed commercial residential district now, so I'm sure that even in an alleyway, there will be enough activity that it is exhausting to review. So the frigate system sat idle until today.
A few weeks ago, Edison posed the question to me, which was, in effect: "My friends were discussing cameras and they like cameras because they believe that cameras give them safety, and they are willing to trade privacy for safety. What do you think?". I gave some semblance of an answer that I am not a big fan. I think the eff does a good job of articulating this concern for me. That's one of the reasons I fund them every year. But then I thought to myself, "this stuff is widespread, why are we discussing it as though it is an option", which got me to look up the traffic cameras here in Seattle. They are here and the Bellevue ones can be found here. They are all sent in HLS, which is apparently hit or miss. I found that frigate wouldn't load the Bellevue traffic cameras which led me to MediaMTX, which works fine. So now I've got Frigate watching some parts of Bellevue.
It took about an hour to configure.