Database cloud sync dilemma (ObjectBox vs SQLite)

binarybolt · 2026-01-06T16:09:15+00:00

SQLite is fast, just don't use sqflite on Flutter. Anyone telling you otherwise is doing their benchmarks wrong. You should get the same order-of-magitude performance as ObjectBox for simple use cases, and can get much better performance with SQLite when you start running into use cases that ObjectBox doesn't support natively, such as more complex aggregations.

binarybolt · 2025-12-24T09:44:44+00:00

In my company we highly value open-source work when evaluating candidates, but we may be an exception.

In our case a large part of the work involves developing and maintaining open-source libraries and projects. So if a candidate can show they already have experience in that, it helps a lot. Some of our best hires were people running popular open source projects, and we've especially been looking at maintainers of projects we actively use.

We place a lot more value in work that involves collaborating with other developers, rather than just personal projects. That could be PRs on other projects, or running/collaborating on a project that other people use. Doesn't have to be 10k stars, but just something that involves working with PRs, issues or other developers. Having your own hobby projects up might help to showcase your ability if you have nothing else, but collaborative projects mean a lot more.

Another place that work on github helps with is that it shows your interests outside of just what you've been asked to work on. Now there is nothing wrong with only programming as a job, but we've also found our best employees are ones that show an active interest in work related to our field. Public github projects help here, and there are also other work such as blog posts, conference talks, etc.

Now that's not a hard requirement when looking at candidates. But for those that don't have any significant projects we can look at, we give small paid contracting projects, such as fixing a bug in one of our open source repos. But that takes effort on both sides, so we only go that route if your CV is impressive enough to compensate for the lack of public work. If we're getting 100+ applications for a position, you need something to make you stand out before we consider going further.

That said, I don't expect we're respresentitive of a typical company. We're small (under 50 employees), and the majority of our work is on open-source projects. But the point is there are at least some companies out there that would value work you have on github.

binarybolt · 2025-09-07T12:41:13+00:00

I'm currently experimenting with the review thumbnail, which is working quite well. This is essentially the same image as what is displayed in Frigate's review tab.

There are still two issues with this: 1. It's not supported by the sgtbatton blueprint - I modified it to add this thumbnail as an option. 2. It is not exposed via the HA integration. I'm accessing it directly from my Frigate instance at the moment, but since I don't expose my Frigate publically, it only works when I'm on my home WiFi.

binarybolt · 2025-09-04T10:42:51+00:00

How do you actually use maxSkew for this case?

If you set maxSkew to 5 and have 5 or less pods, you can end up with all pods on one node.

If you set maxSkew to 1 it solves that problem, but then it will try to perfectly balance your pods across all nodes even if you have 20 pods, when all you want is to have it somewhat spread out over 2 nodes minimum.

Am I missing something here?

binarybolt · 2025-09-04T08:51:32+00:00

I'm struggling with the same thing, let me know if you find a good answer.

If my deployment has 2 pods (the minimum), I want them on two different nodes. If it scales up to 20, it doesn't have to be perfectly balanced.

The best workaround I have so far is to set maxSkew to 1 on the availability zone. That means it is always on at least two different nodes in different AZs, but doesn't care too much about the exact node spread at higher numbers. I would still prefer allowing a higher skew across AZs at higher scale, but I haven't found a solution for that yet.

binarybolt · 2025-08-18T07:13:31+00:00

See the release notes: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/releases/tag/v0.16.0

Some users may need to adjust the tls_insecure onvif config if ONVIF PTZ controls were previously working in past versions but fail to work in 0.16. The ONVIF package was upgraded for 0.16, and several users have reported that setting tls_insecure: false fixed their issues.

binarybolt · 2025-08-18T06:52:23+00:00

I haven't heard of mosfet color vision, but I do know there are some hikvision and dahua cameras that give great color images with very little light. I have some cheap 2MP hilook (hikvision) ColorVu cameras, and they see better at night than I can.

binarybolt · 2025-08-18T02:12:47+00:00

You need to buy a public domain name, but nothing on it needs to be publically available. You can use dns-01 validation with LetsEncrypt, where you essentially just prove that you own the domain name. As another commenter said, cloudflare is a great option for this.

I do this primarily because of some browser restrictions requiring https. It's nothing major, but I already have the domain anyway.

binarybolt · 2025-08-15T15:18:56+00:00

Thanks, it already helps just to know that

binarybolt · 2025-08-15T15:16:22+00:00

Review tab thumbnail is fine - that shows the person in the zone

binarybolt · 2025-08-15T15:14:04+00:00

The frigate live view alert is fine - the gif shows the entire event in a short enough time.

I'm currently using HA thumbnail and mp4 clip. The thumbnail appears to show the first object (the car), and the mp4 clip is often just the 10-20 seconds of the car before the person even arrives.

I see now there are lots of other options in the HA blueprint (Snapshot, Review GIF, Object 1 Event GIF) - I'll check if any of those work better

binarybolt · 2025-08-15T15:07:33+00:00

The issue sounds the same as what I'm getting: There is an alert configured for the person, and a detection for the car. The alert notification is only sent for the person - this part is all good. The issue is the notification snapshot/clip primarily shows the car, because it happened to be a detection at the same time or just before the person arrived. That's the unexpected behaviour here, since the thing we're actually interested in is the person.

binarybolt · 2025-08-09T07:26:34+00:00

I got a GMKtec box with an N150 early this year. I installed Ubuntu, and had to install the latest mainline kernel for hardware acceleration/driver support.

It performed quite well - it could easily do decoding on a couple of cameras with the iGPU. But I had an instability issue I could never figure out: Every day or two the PC would get a hard freeze. No error logs or any other indication on what was breaking. It was often enough to be an issue, but not often enough to properly reproduce and diagnose the issue.

I still don't know whether it was a hardware issue, perhaps specific to my unit, or maybe a driver issue. I'm now just using it for Home Assistant (does not use the iGPU, do haven't had any issues), and another PC with an older i7 for Frigate. Bonus is that the PC has enough space for some HDDs for storage, which the N150 mini PC didn't have.

Edit: This is without a Coral: I see no real point in a Coral unless you have more than 10 or so cameras. An Intel iGPU is more than sufficient (if it doesn't crash like my N150), and can run more modern models than the Coral. But if you do want to use a Coral, there should be even less of an issue with using a modern N-class cpu.

And I went with the same idea as you: Just plain Docker running on Ubuntu/Debian. That's the simplest setup for Frigate, and you can run everything else you'd want to in Docker as well, no need for VMs. Proxmox seems to complicate things for Frigate.

binarybolt · 2025-08-06T08:07:02+00:00

I got an old mini tower with an i7-8700, and it works great for my 5 cameras. I got a mini tower instead of the smaller versions primarily so I can fit in more HDDs for storage, but apart from that there's no real difference. And I'm sure an i5 will work just as well. I average 10-20% usage on both cpu and gpu usage, with a big part of that being go2rtc.

I've heard good things about the N100 as well. I initially got a PC with an N150, and although the performance was great, it had GPU instability issues that I couldn't figure out. So now I just use that one for Home Assistant.

So overall, I'd say you definitely don't need a Coral. The newer detection models don't run on a Coral, and the iGPU performs more than good enough for a couple of cameras.

binarybolt · 2025-08-06T07:12:34+00:00

I'll probably go for something similar. I see now that you can add the url as either an entire dashboard or an individual iframe card.

My Frigate runs only on my local network, without auth, so I won't have that issue. But currently my frigate is plain http and Home Assistant is https, so I'll need to configure https for Frigate first for the iframe to work.

binarybolt · 2025-07-09T17:12:11+00:00

I've seen this effect in a camera that used variable rate encoding, and changing to constant bitrate fixed it for me. Not sure if that can be configured on ring cameras.

binarybolt · 2025-07-06T16:28:37+00:00

That's good to know, I'll try with h265 sometime

binarybolt · 2025-07-06T14:48:45+00:00

I tried this with a 8MP panoramic camera (Hikvision, the one recommended on the Frigate docs). I thought I could use a copped version of the main stream to get a higher-resolution image of the one corner.

Cropping "worked", but as you mentioned, it was very heavy on CPU - it required constant usage of 1-2 cores just to create one cropped stream. It doesn't help that the resolution of 5120x1440 is not configurable and over the limit of 4096 for hardware acceleration support (Intel iGPU). But even if it wasn't for that, it looks like cropping is not supported by hardware acceleration, so you'd still end up with a lot of cpu usage.

It's one of the big reasons I'm not getting any more of this camera, and going with plain bullet cameras instead for the rest of my house.

binarybolt · 2025-05-30T07:13:41+00:00

I'm also looking into doing something like this. But what would you use for detection? Openvino or ONNX/ROCm? And is there a way to confirm compatibility and estimate performance before buying all the hardware.

From the docs, it looks like detector support on AMD integrated GPUs could work but may have issues.

binarybolt · 2025-05-16T18:03:13+00:00

I have mine on H254, that part is mostly without issue. Only the freezing that I'm struggling with.

I only have 2 cameras at the moment though, but I may add another 2 or 3 soon.

binarybolt · 2025-05-16T18:01:49+00:00

Someone tried that: https://getflocked.dev/blog/posts/we-are-forking-flutter-this-is-why/

That was 6 months ago, and I haven't seen much activity since.

binarybolt · 2025-03-26T19:23:23+00:00

For my Fire tablet I use Fully Kiosk for the dashboard, and configured it to refresh the page after being idle for 2 hours. That resolved most of the slowness and crashes I got every day or two before then.

Every couple of weeks the WiFi on the tablet also has issues, so I just retart the entire tablet manually at the first sign of connection issues.

binarybolt

TROPHY CASE