Guide to enable high contrast motion detection automatically via MQTT and Home Assistant automation (night time etc)

[LaurenceGough]

Hi all,

I just thought I'd do a very quick guide on how to enable high contrast motion detection automatically via MQTT and Home Assistant automation for night time etc.

My personal reason: I find the high contrast mode helps detect activity at night with the lower camera contrast of the IR light, but with this on way too much stuff was being detected as motion during the day, causing higher CCTV and Coral usage.

You'll need an MQTT server running such as Mosquitto which most have already.

In Home assistant setup an automation as follows:

Trigger:
When the sun sets (sunset) - add optional offset if required here

Actions:
MQTT: publish
Topic: frigate/CamNameHereCaseSensitive/improve_contrast/set
Payload (tick): ON

You'll need to setup another automation at sunrise to turn it off. The only difference being the trigger and the payload is OFF instead.

In the Frigate logs around the time of these triggers you should hopefully see:
"frigate.comms.dispatcher INFO : Turning off improve contrast for CameraNameHere" or
"frigate.comms.dispatcher INFO : Turning on improve contrast for CameraNameHere"

Enjoy, hopefully it helps someone!

[blacknell]

Is there anyway frigate could listen on a wildcard for cameras so I can switch improve contrast on them with one message

eg frigate/all/improve_contrast

[NickM-27]

You just enable it in the integration settings, they are disabled by default

[brujoand]

I’m sorry could you toss me in the right direction? I’m not seeing anything under the configuration nor in the docs: https://docs.frigate.video/integrations/home-assistant

[NickM-27]

You enable it in the home assistant UI

[FischLu]

I'm curious why these three functions are disabled by default? Is it because they are advanced features, or is there a performance penalty to turning them on? Thanks

[NickM-27]

it's because the integration has lots of options so some are disabled to reduce clutter and historically users did not use this often

[NeoDuder]

I'm doing something similar with NodeRed. The issue I'm having is that my Frigate Container restarts in the early morning and sets this back to on as it's the default. Is there any way to set this to manual within the Frigate config?