A daily LLM-powered health check flagged that 8 out of 10 cameras had crash counts in the hundreds. The root cause turned out to be two baby monitor cameras, a go2rtc reconnect window, and a vaapi cascade failure — none of which were directly obvious. Here’s how we found it and fixed it.
How the Issue Was Found # I’ve been building a daily home health agent — a scheduled script that queries all home services (Frigate, Home Assistant, Paperless, the arr stack) and passes the data to a local LLM for analysis. The idea: instead of manually checking dashboards, get a morning summary that flags anything unusual.
Replacing Frigate’s default SSD MobileNet detector with YOLOv9t (tiny) running on the Intel N97’s integrated GPU via OpenVINO. Covers model export, correct Frigate config, and a critical gotcha that causes 100% false positives if you get it wrong.
Setup # Server: Intel N97 (Debian 13), 8 camera streams Frigate: 0.17, running in Docker Detector: OpenVINO GPU (/dev/dri/renderD128) Previous model: SSD MobileNet v2 (built-in, 300×300) New model: YOLOv9t ONNX (320×320, 8.3 MB) Why YOLOv9t? # The default SSD MobileNet v2 bundled with Frigate’s OpenVINO image is fast and lightweight, but accuracy suffers on partially occluded objects and objects at the edges of the frame. YOLOv9t (tiny) offers meaningfully better detection quality with a similar computational footprint — at 320×320 input and ~18ms inference on the N97 iGPU, it handles 8 concurrent camera streams comfortably.
Setting up Frigate NVR on a dedicated Debian server (Intel N97) to replace a traditional NVR. Covers Docker compose, go2rtc stream config, hardware acceleration, HA integration, push notifications, and zone-based alerting. Traffic between VLANs goes through the main router (UCG Ultra).
Hardware & Context # Server: Intel N97 mini PC (debian.lan, 10.0.10.11), Debian 13 Cameras: 8 Reolink PoE cameras on camera VLAN (10.0.40.0/24), 2 Nanit monitors on IoT VLAN (10.0.20.0/24) Existing NVR: kept running for continuous recording; Frigate handles detection and event clips only Home Assistant: on IoT VLAN (10.0.20.10), MQTT broker already running Storage Design # Frigate recordings go to a dedicated NAS share — no local NVMe waste for surveillance video.