Motion Detection Sensor in Home Assistant - Help needed

[championc]

I have just installed a Reolink doorbell and have enabled RTSP and have added this camera into Frigate.

I have configured to detection and record parameters for my needs, and the required motion events are being recorded.

However, when I look at the sensor for Motion in Home Assistant, it bares no resemblance to when recordings were done. Motíon is recorded as being almost constant.

So I guess the motion is the pre-filtered movement detection events.

Is there any way to have a Motion event only based on when recordings were triggered ?

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

You're correct - the motion sensor in Home Assistant reflects raw motion detection, not filtered recording events.

The motion sensor shows when Frigate detects pixel changes in the frame, which happens before object detection runs. This is why it appears almost constant compared to your recordings(1).

For automations based on actual recordings, you should use MQTT sensors on the frigate/events or frigate/reviews topic instead of the motion sensors(1). The occupancy sensors have fewer checks and can trigger on false positives because they're designed for low latency use cases like turning on lights(1).

If you want to reduce the motion sensor sensitivity itself, you can adjust motion detection parameters in your config:

• Increase threshold (default: 30) to make motion detection less sensitive(2)
• Increase contour_area (default: 10) to prevent smaller areas from triggering motion(2)
• Add motion masks to exclude areas that trigger constant motion(2)

You can also adjust mqtt_off_delay (default: 30 seconds) which controls the delay when updating camera motion through MQTT from ON to OFF(2).

For recording-based automations, consider using the binary sensors for specific object types (like person) or MQTT events instead of the motion sensor(1).

📚 Sources:

1. Home Assistant Integration
2. Full Reference Config

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[championc]

I don't have any MQTT sensors. What configuration am I missing to enable MQTT ?

[WilyWalrus]

Generally speaking, in Home Assistant, you don't want Frigate's "motion" entities. You want the "person occupancy" entities. Those are what will tell you when a person appears.

[championc]

Ah ha - fantastic, thanks a lot for that.

I was about to confirm that I can see all topics within MQTT-Explorer

I think the "person occupancy" entity will be perfect, since that is just people and will ignore cars etc.

For context, I am using an Energy Dashboard on a kitchen wall mounted tablet. It can popup a camera when motion is detected, so the idea was for it to popup the doorbell. Of course, it was triggering for allsorts.

The debug screen has been very useful now to remove unwanted areas of motion too, and to finetune settings