camwall

A full screen camera wall for Frigate. Put it on a Raspberry Pi with a screen and leave it running.

Every camera is shown next to a clock and the latest tracked event, refreshed from Frigate's snapshot API. Everything else comes from the same WebSocket the Frigate web UI uses, so camwall only needs the Frigate URL and a login. No MQTT broker is involved.

• A camera with active tracked objects gets the same red outline as in the Frigate live view.
• When Frigate raises an alert, that camera takes over the screen and shows when the alert started, until the alert ends. If other cameras are alerting or tracking objects at the same time, the screen splits between all of them.
• Recent events are shown under the clock with their label, camera and time, as many as fit at a readable size.
• Tiles are fetched at the size they are drawn, and the grid picks the column count that makes the cameras largest, so it works the same on a 7" 800x480 panel and on a 4K monitor.
• Tap a camera to show it full screen, tap again to go back. In a split, a tap picks one camera and a second tap returns to the split.
• The screen can dim when nothing is happening, turn off after a longer time, and come straight back when something is detected.
• The display's own CPU, temperature, load and memory, and Frigate's CPU, GPU, detector speed and recording disk use, sit at the bottom of the clock panel. The display line turns red if a Raspberry Pi reports undervoltage.
• A tile turns red and says why when its feed goes stale, and a banner shows when Frigate cannot be reached.

Tested with Frigate 0.18 on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (trixie).

Frigate user

Create a user with the viewer role in Frigate (Settings, Users) for camwall to log in with. Frigate's authenticated port is 8971 and uses a self signed certificate by default, so set FRIGATE_INSECURE=1 unless you have put a real certificate on it.

If you point camwall at the unauthenticated port 5000, leave FRIGATE_USER unset.

Configuration

All settings are environment variables.

Variable	Default
FRIGATE_URL	required	e.g. https://frigate.local:8971
FRIGATE_USER	none	Frigate username; no login when unset
FRIGATE_PASSWORD	none
FRIGATE_INSECURE	0	1 skips TLS certificate checks
CAMERAS	from Frigate	Comma separated list, in display order
LAYOUT	grid	grid, or feature for one large camera with the rest in a column
INTERVAL	0.5	Seconds between snapshot fetches per camera
BRIGHTNESS	1	Normal brightness, 0 to 1 or a percentage
DIM_AFTER	off	Seconds without activity before dimming
DIM_BRIGHTNESS	0.25	Brightness while dimmed
OFF_AFTER	off	Seconds without activity before the screen turns off
SCREEN_OFF_COMMAND	none	Shell command run when the screen turns off
SCREEN_ON_COMMAND	none	Shell command run when it turns back on
BACKLIGHT	first found	Device in /sys/class/backlight, or none to dim in software
DIAGNOSTICS	1	0 hides the display and Frigate stats
CLOCK_FORMAT	%H:%M	chrono format
DATE_FORMAT	%a %d %b

Without CAMERAS, camwall shows the cameras that are enabled and visible on Frigate's dashboard, sorted by their ui.order.

Brightness and screen off

Activity means an active tracked object or an alert on any shown camera, or a touch. With DIM_AFTER=60, the screen fades to DIM_BRIGHTNESS after a minute without activity and brightens again as soon as there is some. With OFF_AFTER=1800, it goes black after half an hour and snapshot fetching pauses until the next activity. A touch that wakes the screen does not also open a camera.

If the display has a backlight in /sys/class/backlight, as the official Raspberry Pi touch displays do, camwall sets it directly, and at OFF_AFTER the backlight goes to zero. The camwall user needs write access to it, which dist/90-backlight.rules grants to the video group. HDMI displays usually have no such control, so camwall dims by drawing black over the picture. That makes the picture darker but leaves the backlight on.

To turn an HDMI display off at OFF_AFTER, set the two commands. Under cage, wlr-randr can disable the output:

SCREEN_OFF_COMMAND=wlr-randr --output HDMI-A-1 --off
SCREEN_ON_COMMAND=wlr-randr --output HDMI-A-1 --on

Run wlr-randr as the camwall user to find the output name. A TV can be put in standby over HDMI CEC with cec-ctl instead.

Build

cargo build --release

For a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 from an x86 machine with gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu installed:

rustup target add aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
cargo build --release --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

The build host's aarch64 glibc must be no newer than the one on the Pi. A static musl build will not work because EGL and Wayland are loaded at runtime. Prebuilt x86_64 and aarch64 binaries are attached to each GitHub release.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi from scratch

dist/cloud-init has a user-data and network-config for Raspberry Pi OS Lite (trixie or later, 64 bit), which provisions itself with cloud-init on first boot. Flash the image, then copy both files over the ones on the card's boot partition after editing them:

• in user-data, the SSH key, timezone and the Frigate settings in /etc/camwall.env
• in network-config, the WiFi name, password and country, or remove the wifis section for ethernet

Set optional: false on the interface the Pi will actually use, so cloud-init waits for the network before installing packages. First boot needs internet access: it installs cage, then downloads the latest aarch64 release of camwall from GitHub. After a few minutes the wall starts on the attached screen.

Running on a Raspberry Pi

camwall is a Wayland app. On a Pi without a desktop, run it under cage, a compositor that shows one app full screen.

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends cage libegl1 libgles2 libgl1-mesa-dri wlr-randr
sudo useradd --system --shell /usr/sbin/nologin --groups video,render,input camwall
sudo install -m755 camwall /usr/local/bin/
sudo install -m640 -g camwall dist/camwall.env.example /etc/camwall.env
sudo install -m644 dist/camwall.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo install -m644 dist/90-backlight.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo systemctl disable getty@tty1
sudo systemctl enable --now camwall

Edit /etc/camwall.env before starting it. The service takes over tty1 and restarts camwall if it exits. To stop the console blanking the screen, add consoleblank=0 to /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt.

To take a screenshot of the running wall, install grim and run:

sudo -u camwall env XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u camwall) WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0 grim wall.png

On a desktop, just run the binary with the variables set.

License

MIT