Utility to send Frigate event notifications to other messengers

[maylorian]

Hey everyone!

For us uninitiated that do not run a HA instance, I have created a dead-simple utility that will poll MQTT for new detections and pipe them through to a messenger of choice. Currently, only discord and slack are supported but I plan on adding more in the future.

https://github.com/andreasavg/Frigatier

So the utility can and will send messages to all enabled messengers. It will construct a message like the following:

A <detection label> was detected by <camera name>

And it will also make a request to /api/events/<event id>/thumbnail.jpg to get a thumbnail to send.

The repo README explains what you need to run it but here's an overview:

You need to either download or compile the binary and then create a config.yml file next to the binary:

frigate:
  host: <frigate IP>
  port: <frigate port>
  
mqtt:
  host: <mqtt IP>
  port: <mqtt port>
  user: <username> #optional
  password: <password> #optional 

messengers:
  slack:
    enabled: True
    token: <slack token>
    channel: <channel ID>

  discord:
    enabled: True
    token: <discord bot token>
    channel: <channel or user id>

I've already published pre-compiled binaries for linux and windows (God I hope I've done the release correctly) or you can just compile your own:

git clone https://github.com/andreasavg/Frigatier
cd Frigatier && cd app
go build

Now I do have a question, I've noticed that the MQTT message in frigate/events contains both a before and after entry. For the moment, I always read the before entry and just sit idle until false_positive is set to false. Once that's true, I trigger a message. When subsequent events with the same ID come in, I just ignore them until end_date is set and that's when I discard the event completely.

Is there any point where I should be paying attention to the after event?

This is a very VERY early release without much testing. I just wanted to get your opinion on how useful something like this would be. Expect wormholes consuming your cat.

[NickM-27]

Very cool thanks for sharing!

Is there any point where I should be paying attention to the after event?

yes, for example if you want to notify when a car has entered the driveway (after.current_zone == 'driveway') but you only want to do that when the car was not already in the driveway ('driveway' not in before.entered_zones)

[fnzv]

I saw that too late ahah, i also wrote a Golang notification script but it leverages a database for tracking and not the already existing MQTT

If anyone needs another way of sending notifications to Telegram this is my quick hack:

• https://github.com/fnzv/kondor

[skupi20]

Why not use nodered docker, it has mqtt. You can not only send message to all messengers supported by nodered addons but also you can make some smart conditions for that messages (like motion, time, date etc.). I use that and get message on telegram with snapshot :)

You can make inputs and combine them with home assistant. I think mqtt support in frigate is enough and make so many possibilities.