A month of Frigate NVR, Broken Stuff.. and so on.

So, it's been an entire month since I moved away from ZoneMinder for my NVR and replaced it with Frigate. It's been an interesting experience.

I added a Coral TPU for better event detection which has mostly worked. I did note at one point after not keeping an eye on it for a week that it'd stopped recording events for a couple of days and I needed to restart the Docker container. 

Recording is massively improved - which is surprising to be honest. I had been using h265 for its compression over h264 but had to revert back for the sake of browser compatibility with Frigate and integration into my Home Assistant. Despite that, I've got a months worth of recordings (and events) and still have space left on the disk. With ZoneMinder, it was struggling past 3 weeks. 

It can be slow at times, and I had to spend a fair bit of time trying to find a way to handle live view reliably. I wound up using WebRTC on Home Assistant and created a dashboard full of cards showing the required cameras. My live view monitor is connected to a server, so it's just loaded via Chrome. Sometimes the cameras do drop out and buffer and otherwise stop displaying. I've added a Chrome extension that force reloads the page every few minutes. I'd also decided that I really wanted to have a live display up for the solar panel generation and our mains power usage, so I picked a camera that we really don't need to live monitor and drop it off, then added the additional info panels to suit. 

Anyway, that's month old stuff. More recently:

- The garage door is busted and awaiting replacement. Fun.

- I'm awaiting to hear back from a local building surveyor on a quote for a building permit to build our new verandah. I've paid for the verandah kit already. The first quote cost almost as much as the kit. Hmmmm.

- I had an issue recently in my Falcon where the USB stick I'd been using stopped working for music. Prior to that, I'd used an old iPhone and it'd been pretty good. Certainly a far better integration. Unfortunately said old iPhone was getting past it. I replaced it with an old iPhone 6 that arrived yesterday. I plugged into the car, and it'd charge, but not connect.

I took the risk and disconnected the battery to reset it. I've had issues with the ICC before locking up and things not working until I take the power away for a bit. Anyone who's owned a FG Mk2 Falcon knows that this is always a risky move - the ICCs are known for dying and never coming back. Unfortunately this is exactly what happened. 

I connected the battery then opened the door. The ICC screen came on (unusual), the Ford logo appeared. Then coloured lines. Bugger.

I disconnected and left it for half an hour while I dealt with an aquatic emergency in our tiger oscars tank. I returned, reconnected the battery and the same result. The screen with its lines would stay on. The kind of "stay on" that flattens batteries. 

I hooked the car up to a battery charger to keep some power into it and left. A couple of hours later I came back to find the screen had died off properly. At least now it'll stop wasting power. I also can't see any of the audio, phone, climate control or any of the various car configuration controls that are managed through the ICC. 

Replacements of the ICC is a bit of a dilemma - could get a second hand one but risk the same issue. Get a refurbished one from ASL Media - again and risk the same issue. Get a Kayhan unit - which has a lot of newer tech, but have a history of laggy models and mixed reviews about their service. Or get something like a tacky looking Aeropro fascia and go back to my youth and be overloaded by endless car stereo options. 

Straight off the bat - the Aeropro fascias to me are horrible. I hate them with a passion, and I really do want to keep the car as close to factory as possible. I tossed up the ASL vs Kayhan options for a bit. Around $700 for the Kayhan, but it requires a $200 security deposit and returning the old unit. The net gain for features is zero. It's just repaired same thing. 

Kayhan - newer models seem to be reviewed better and they have a Christmas promo on that brings the pricing down to around $800. Feature gain - this model runs Linux - CarPlay (for the iPhone), Android Auto (for my actual phone), better DSP, dual USB input, Bluetooth 5, Digital Radio (DAB - not that I'm likely to ever use it), plus whatever I can leverage out of it. It's not entirely clear if this unit has GPS built in. With the iPhone/Android integration options, I can work around that anyway, so I'm ahead either way. I do loose the CD player. Of which I've used maybe 10 times in the past 7 years.

I had a chat the someone from Kayhan last night who told me to let them know my order number ASAP so they could make sure they get it shipped out today for me. Given it being this close to Christmas - and the fact I'd really like to have my car fully functional by then, I need it here as soon as possible.. and I need a few hours to dismantle the car and install it. 

I'm not entirely sure in a year or two I won't regret the Kayhan option - but at least there is some net gain for my money. 

I'm pretty curious to see how this thing actually works. There aren't a lot of reviews, nor much information about this model that has been around for the past 10 months. I would have liked a walkthrough video of the "Linux" version given that it appears to be different than the Android version. 

From a spec perspective, it seems that there is lower spec hardware behind this than their much more expensive Android models. I'm not real sure if that makes much difference at the end of the day - I'm not trying to leverage it like a mobile device. I just need it to play some music from an iPhone, handle some bluetooth phone calls and let me drive the climate control. In a car that I plan on driving rarely fairly soon.

If I had time on my side, I'd probably be pushing a lot harder to understand the tech specs, but right now I'm just chasing functionality.