Custom overlay for Dahua cameras

[jakeycrx]

I just spent a good few hours getting this working, so I thought I would post up as it's something I've wanted to do for a while.

Using the API you can overlay any value from Home Assistant onto your Dahua camera. I'm overlaying temp and RH. It's very simple once I worked it out, but there is a lot of trial and error involved with the Dahua API.

I'm using a shell command. You can't have spaces in the string you're trying to overlay otherwise it won't work. The vertical bar is a line break. I made sensor templates to add the °C and % symbols, then I have an automation to run the shell command when the temp or RH changes. It's working on my 2 Dahua cameras.

curl -s -g --digest -u user:pass "http://192.168.1.7/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=setConfig&ChannelTitle[0].Name={{ states('sensor.camera_overlay_temp') }}|{{ states('sensor.camera_overlay_rh') }}"

[hawkeye217]

Moving this to the Show and Tell category. Nice work!

[jakeycrx]

My next task is to see if I can overlay the detected object and score. It should be possible, but from past experience the camera gets laggy if you spam the API too much.

[ayybe]

Would love this on my Reolink, or Tapo, but would settle for this on my Amcrest (rebadged duhua)

[leccelecce]

Really interesting, quite a few use cases I can think of based on your inspiration!

Perhaps this is a possible feature request for Frigate itself to show an overlay in the WebUI (as opposed to adding on to the stream which presumably requires re-encoding). With HTTP and MQTT APIs to set the text, location, styling.

That way it would be camera independent, lightweight, and customisable within the bounds of HTML/CSS. And it could potentially have direct access to Frigate variables.

What do you think @hawkeye217 - open to a PR for something like that? I would probably just do it via MQTT and the sender would need to set retain on messages to ensure it persisted across Frigate restarts. Probably wouldn't get too clever with styling either.

[hawkeye217]

To me this falls under the same scope of other requests we've had to add buttons/controls to the UI for unique features that don't apply to most users. For things like this, rather than a PR, I'd suggest opening a feature request and seeing if it gauges enough reaction. If it does, then we can run it by Blake and see what he thinks.

[leccelecce]

Thinking about it I think a UI based version is a bit kneecapped really vs a stream overlay, as well off doing it in HASS.

Given the Frigate community is spread across here (issues and discussions), Reddit, Discord, HA forums - I don't know how you guys keep up