Set Up Coral PCIe for Frigate Running on Proxmox LXC

About a year ago, I ordered a Google Coral Mini PCIe Accelerator to use with my installation of Frigate for our PoE cameras. Due to chip shortages, it didn't arrive until about a week ago, and when it did arrive I realized I should have ordered one of the M.2 versions to fit my mobo's regular PCIe slots 🤦🏻‍♂️ Luckily, I was able to snag a Mini PCIe → PCIe x1 adapter for pretty cheap and get the physical device installed. I removed the antennae connectors on the adapter since I wasn't using the adapter for WiFi or Bluetooth. After the physical install, I had to jump through a few hoops to get it set up for use with Frigate.

Driver Setup

For the most part, Coral's docs on setup were pretty much all that was needed to get the drivers set up on my machine. I just logged into my Proxmox node and ran the commands in the shell. However, I did hit a couple of snags, and here's how I resolved them.

Everything went fine until I went to run ls /dev/apex_0 to verify that the PCIe driver was loaded after rebooting, and got a response of:

Searching around, I found this thread explaining a workaround to get it going. For my case, I had to run the following to update/upgrade everything and get the necessary packages installed correctly:

After rebooting, all was well, and ls /dev/apex_0 resulted in the expected output per the Coral docs. I was then able to continue on to install the PyCoral library.

Configuration for Frigate on Docker in LXC Container

I have a bit of an "Inception" situation for Frigate on Proxmox; it runs on a Docker container, and Docker itself is running inside of an LXC container. I also use Portainer installed on the LXC container to make Docker management a little easier. In order to get the PCIe Coral available to the Frigate Docker container, and to get the Frigate config set up to use it, I took the following steps.

Make the Device Available to the LXC Container

In order for the device to be available to the Frigate Docker container, first we need to make /dev/apex_0 available to the LXC container. Thanks to this comment on Reddit, I was able to figure this part out. In the Proxmox node shell, open /etc/pve/lxc/<CONTAINER_ID>.conf for editing. I use vi for editing, but use whatever you like. Also, note that my container ID in th example is 102, but replace that value with the ID of yours to edit the correct config.

Add the following lines to the config:

Add the Device to Docker Config

I have our Docker container for Frigate set up using compose via Portainer, so this part was as easy as going to Stacks → frigate → Editor, and adding the devices section to the compose config. If you're not running Portainer, why not? 😛 And if you're not using Docker compose... really... why not? 😳

After adding the lines, I just clicked Update the stack to redeploy it.

Update Frigate Config

In the config.yml for Frigate, update the detectors options to use the Coral:

Restart the Frigate Docker container, and check the logs to make sure it doesn't throw any errors about not being able to see the device. You're good to go if no errors are thrown 🎉

Conclusion

It could just be placebo effect, but I feel like our Frigate setup is a lot faster to determine what types of objects are being detected on camera ever since getting the Coral installed and set up. If you were trying to get a Coral installed on your home server for use with Frigate in a similar setup, I hope this tutorial has helped you along the way to getting it going. Cheers 🍻