Custom Event Notication from Frigate NVR to Signal

This is my setup that includes running Frigate NVR through a Google Coral TPU. It sends events to an Apache Mosquitto MQTT broker. From there, I have a python script called "send_message" that reads from the frigate/events MQTT topic and when the right message comes through, it will grab the thumbnail image of the event from the Frigate HTTP API and send that to signal-cli-rest-api for delivery to a Signal recipient.

1. Checkout this git repo

2. Create your Frigate config in ./frigate/conf/conf.yml. Mine looks something like this:

   detectors: # <---- add detectors
     coral:
       type: edgetpu
       device: usb
   
   cameras:
     front: # <------ Name the camera
       enabled: True
       ffmpeg:
         inputs:
           - path: rtsp://blah@1.1.1.1/live0 # <----- The stream you want to use for detection
             roles:
               - detect
               - record
         hwaccel_args: preset-vaapi
       detect:
         enabled: True # <---- disable detection until you have a working camera feed
       record: # <----- Enable recording
         enabled: True
         retain:
           mode: all
         events:
           retain:
             mode: active_objects
       snapshots:
         enabled: True
         crop: True
   
   objects:
     filters:
       person:
         min_area: 2500
   
   timestamp_style:
     format: "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S%Z"
     effect: "shadow"
   
   mqtt:
     enabled: True
     host: mqtt
     topic_prefix: frigate
     client_id: frigate
   

3. Build send_message Docker image

   cd send_message
   sudo docker build -t send_message .
   

4. Run signal-cli-rest-api once just to link your Signal Number

   1. Register for Signal, if you haven't already and create a group that all your NVR messages will go to.
   2. Run the signal-cli-rest-api docker image seperately just once to link it to your Signal account

   mkdir ./signal-cli-config
   sudo docker run --name signal-api --rm -p 8080:8080 \
     -v ./signal-cli-config:/home/.local/share/signal-cli \
     -e 'MODE=native' bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api
   

   3. Follow the instructions in https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api/tree/master to link your Signal Number
   4. Point a browser or curl to http://localhost:8080/v1/groups/<number>, and find the group id of the Signal group you just created. It should look like group.somethingsomethingsomething.
   5. Close the signal-cli-rest-api docker terminal to close and delete the container

5. Create .env file in this directory with the following values

   SIGNAL_NUMBER="+15555555555" (substitute with your number!)
   SIGNAL_RECIPIENT="GROUP ID" (substitute with the group id you retrieved from above)
   

6. Run everything In this directory, run:

   sudo docker compose up -d
   

If you need to change anything in this setup, here are some helpful info.

• If you need to modify the send_message script, edit the send_message/send_message.py file. Remember to run sudo docker build -t send_message . inside the send_message directoryto rebuild the Docker image. Then you'll need to do asudo docker compose downon the root directory and asudo docker compose up -d` to recreate the whole setup with the new send_message code.

• If you only need to update Frigate configs (which you should or you'll be using my camera settings), then you need to update frigate/conf/conf.yaml. Then run sudo docker compose restart on the root directory.

• Similarly, if you need to update the Mosquitto configs, edit mosquitto/conf/mosquitto.conf and restart using docker compose with the command in the previous bullet point.