AI-Powered Security Camera Reviews with Frigate, n8n, and Ollama

AI-Powered Security Camera Reviews with Frigate, n8n, and Ollama
Frigate is great at detecting objects. It will tell you a person showed up at the front porch, or that a car pulled into the driveway. What it won't tell you is whether that person is your neighbor waving hello or someone trying your door handle. For that, you need a brain behind the camera feed, not just a classifier. This workflow wires one up on my local n8n instance so everything stays private and…

From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware

From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware
I have been running Frigate for quite a while now. The Google Coral TPU has long been the "gold standard" for edge processing object detection. It’s efficient, cheap, and handles MobileNet models like a champ. But as my camera count grew and my patience for false positives wore thin, I knew I needed more horsepower. I recently pulled the trigger on the Hailo-8 AI Acceleration Module, and the results have been night and day. The…

Goodbye Ring, Hello Privacy

Goodbye Ring, Hello Privacy
With it being ever more likely that someone could access Ring cameras or lock me out of access to Ring footage, I decided it was time to leave Ring for the doorbell cameras. I had two, one on the house, one on the shop. The shop one needed to go anyway, the only thing it ever did is let me know the grapes were getting too long. The front door was used constantly, so I…

Beyond the IP Address: Modernizing Homelab Infrastructure for Security and Scalability

Beyond the IP Address: Modernizing Homelab Infrastructure for Security and Scalability
In a growing homelab environment, managing services through raw IP addresses and port numbers quickly becomes a bottleneck for both security and usability, not to mention incredibly annoying unsafe browser warnings. My goal for this project was to move away from fragmented IP service access like 192.168.1.50:8123, and implement an internal routing layer. By deploying Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) in conjunction with Cloudflare, I transitioned my stack to a host-based routing model that provides encrypted,…

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation
When I left Elastic, one of my goals was to dive deep into home automation and finally "level up" my setup. Looking back at where I started when we first moved to Graham, it’s almost comical. Back then, "Home Automation" was just a few Philips Hue bulbs and a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant that didn't do much. It was essentially a glorified light switch connected to Alexa. Fast forward to today, and the Raspberry…

Home Assistant – How Did I Get Here?

Home Assistant
I am absolutely horrible at turning off lights. That's how it began. The color changing aspect of Hue bulbs was cool, but adding motion sensors was when I saw the power of automation. I expanded Hue and added Amazon's Alexa for voice control. Then I tried Samsung's SmartThings to integrate Hue with other things, but that was flaky. Next I tried Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. That was enough to introduce me to what…

Rainier Timelapse with Synology NAS

Rainier Timelapse with Synology NAS
When I set up the Synology NAS as my backup solution and security camera solution, one of the things I was curious about was the time lapse feature. I don't really have any need for time lapses of my security cameras, but I did add one special camera on the front of the house for this purpose. As I like to say, if Rainier does go, I'll have the best view in town. Here is…