Frigate – Manage IP Camera with a Raspberry Pi

As a long-time user of high-quality video surveillance systems like Synology and Ubiquiti, I’ve grown accustomed to deploying and relying on their robust, feature-rich ecosystems. However, this time I was looking for something more affordable, focused solely on video management, without the overhead of NAS capabilities or other advanced features. I needed a lightweight solution that could run on a Raspberry Pi—and on Guillaume’s recommendation, I turned to Frigate. This open-source tool offers live video stream management, recording capabilities, and even optional AI-based video analysis. It looks promising and well-built. This post is, as usual, a log of my journey testing this setup in real-time. It’s also an excuse to finally experiment with a Raspberry Pi 5, which I’ve paired with an NVMe drive for video storage, avoiding the SD card’s limited endurance under heavy I/O workloads. I’ll admit, it’s slightly ironic to now need this much power for tasks I used to run smoothly on Synology boxes over a decade ago. Even funnier is that Frigate may require a neural accelerator for its AI features—something that seems excessive when you consider modern AI models like YoLo run on microcontrollers with far less processing power. That said, I don’t plan to use AI in this setup (at least not yet), but I’ve still opted for a dual PCIe HAT to keep the door open for testing a Coral accelerator in the future.

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Holapex – getting your first hologram at home

holapex hologram solution

holapex hologram solution

Did you dream about getting an hologram going out from your cell-phone, this is not sci-fi but a reality for less than 15$. Holapex has raised 3500$ on kickstarter to provide a kit for doing this and it has been delivered during the last days all over the world.

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