Pigeon Alerts on a Repurposed i5: Frigate Without the TPU
Daniel wanted a notification whenever a pigeon landed on his balcony, and he was ready to buy a TPU and hunt for a species-ID model on Hugging Face. Turns out Frigate's default model already has bird as a built-in class, and the leftover work is entirely in configuration. This episode walks through the actual engineering: why YOLOv9-tiny at 320×320 beats a bigger model on a small distant bird, how motion masks cut more CPU than the detector itself, and how object filters and zones keep a human on the balcony from firing the alert. Then the notification layer — MQTT topics, JPEG snapshots…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.