MQTT input to the Frigate UI - could it be possible?

[ElectronicBattle]

Hello

I have a gate alarm which, when opened and closed, generates an MQTT "open" or "closed" message which sends on the LAN and also via Pushover to remote clients. The Mosquitto MQTT broker is hosted on Home Assistant.

Is there a way by which a marker could be placed on the Frigate time line so that video events are easily tied to gate events? A mockup below shows an example of this sort of idea, with a blue line indicating an "open" or a "closed":

I don't know if the frigate API can take some form of MQTT input and generate an icon in the timeline somehow.

[NickM-27]

You can call the API to create a manual event https://docs.frigate.video/integrations/api#post-apieventscamera_namelabelcreate

[ElectronicBattle]

I think I see the gist of it but it'll be beyond me to implement. As far as I can interpret, you can create a manual event with x seconds of MP4 (30 s default) so I could end up with a video clip when the gate opens, labelled appropriately, and the same for when the gate closes.

Would they get written to wherever you mount your /media/clips share ?

Thus do you end up with a directory full of "event clips", listed by date/time if you want, rather than markers on the timeline as per my artist's impression?

[NickM-27]

Thus do you end up with a directory full of "event clips", listed by date/time if you want, rather than markers on the timeline as per my artist's impression?

No, it works exactly the same as if an object was detected, and the "object" is just called whatever you want.

As far as I can interpret, you can create a manual event with x seconds of MP4 (30 s default) so I could end up with a video clip when the gate opens, labelled appropriately, and the same for when the gate closes.

some users have created an easy way to do this in home assistant via rest_command, and at some point the ability should be added directly to the frigate integration

[ElectronicBattle]

I see - clever stuff! Thanks Nick.

[NickM-27]

Here is an HA example #11139

[ElectronicBattle]

That is clever - and not as difficult as I feared. Thanks! Plenty to try to learn. I can now see the sorts of things to search for here and elsewhere.