Do you know of any good Soup-To-Nuts tutorial "for dummies" on such a setup? Finally getting some secure home monitoring/automation has bubbled up as a priority and I've started looking at Home Assistant but even for someone with some technical background the learning curve combined with the sheer breadth of options is overwhelming.

Try following this: https://chatgpt.com/share/6893f888-8a70-800c-ad8a-0987257b93...

In frigate, add this to the top of your configuration file:

mqtt:

  enabled: true

  host: IP_ADDRESS_OF_YOUR_HOMEASSISTANT

  port: 1883

  topic_prefix: frigate

  user: USERNAME_YOU_CREATED_FOR_MQTT

  password: PASSOWRD_YOU_CREATED_FOR_MQTT

Frigate will start sending various messages to Homeassistant. Go to HA, go to MQTT settings and listen to a topic frigate/#

Observe the messages, pick the one which suits your needs.

Follow this for an example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6893fd1c-2940-800c-a358-a840029e6e...

You dont really need to add the HA automation via yaml, you can click it through manually.