I opened my Frigate dashboard one morning and my stomach dropped: 0 detections, hundreds of alerts. My first read was the obvious one — the object detector had fallen over, and Frigate was now firing blind, alerting on raw motion instead of actual objects.

That read was completely wrong. Nothing had broken. The detector was healthy, running OpenVINO inference at ~10 ms per frame the entire time. What had actually happened is that I didn’t understand what the words “Alert” and “Detection” mean in modern Frigate — and once I did, the “outage” evaporated and turned into a five-minute config change.

This is a post about a debugging story with a satisfying anticlimax, and about a genuinely confusing bit of Frigate’s UI vocabulary that trips up a lot of people running 0.14 and later.

Build a complete home automation system using ESP32 sensors, Flask, Docker, and Home Assistant. This comprehensive guide covers hardware selection, sensor board programming, data collection with SQLite, visual dashboards, and creating smart automations like moisture-based RGB lighting alerts for plant care.