Hailo-10H on Home Assistant - Edge AI Home Automation

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Hailo-10H on Home Assistant - Edge AI Home Automation
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We’ve built a community integration of the Hailo-10H AI accelerator with Home Assistant.

We’re working on a full, seamless integration of Hailo-10H into the official Home Assistant and Frigate ecosystems. In the meantime, we wanted to give the community an early integration path so advanced users can start experimenting today. Here’s what we’ve put together - three community projects:

Home Assistant OS build - Adds the Hailo-10H kernel driver and firmware to HAOS
Hailo-10H for Frigate - Hailo-10H runtime integration into Frigate, packaged as a Home Assistant add-on
Hailo VLM Chat add-on - Usage example of how to build an app with Hailo runtime that uses the OS driver. Our example is a Vision Language Model chat app that can describe and answer questions about what your cameras see.

The best part? Multiple add-ons can run at the same time on the same Hailo-10H, thanks to Hailo’s shared virtual device architecture. We’re looking forward to bringing this parallel capability to the Hailo-8 as well.

This is a community-driven experimental project. It is not an official Hailo/Home Assistant/Frigate integration. Here’s what that means:

Building Home Assistant OS from source. Our build adds the Hailo-10H driver and firmware, which isn’t in the official HAOS builds yet. This requires following the official HAOS build guide.

This is for early adopters and makers. If you’re comfortable building OS images and flashing SD cards, you’ll be right at home. If not, this may be worth bookmarking for when native support arrives.

The VLM add-on requires a HEF model file. You’ll need to obtain the VLM model (e.g. Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct.hef) compiled for Hailo-10H and place it on the device. Models are available from Hailo’s developer zone: https://github.com/hailo-ai/hailo_model_zoo_genai/blob/main/docs/MODELS.rst

Hardware required: Raspberry Pi 5 + Hailo-10H (AI HAT+ 2).

Think of this as a technology preview - a working proof-of-concept that demonstrates what’s possible when you combine Hailo’s latest silicon with Home Assistant’s ecosystem.

Quick start guide:

Step 1 - Build Home Assistant OS with Hailo-10H support

Follow the official HAOS build-from-source guide:

Use our repository as the source:
Repository: GitHub - mikehailodev/operating-system: 🔰 Home Assistant Operating System · GitHub
Branch: feature/hailort-package

Build for Raspberry Pi 5 (make rpi5_64), flash the resulting image to your SD card, and boot.

Step 2 - Install the Hailo-10H for Frigate Add-on

In Home Assistant, go to Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store → ⋮ → Repositories and add:

Install “Hailo-10H for Frigate (Full Access)”, disable Protection Mode, and configure your Frigate YAML with the detector set to type: hailo8l (this is intentional - we kept the detector key unchanged). The add-on automatically detects Hailo-10H hardware - no further configuration needed. Please see here a full guide: Hailo + Homeassistant + Frigate. Please note that a custom YOLO model path is required, for example:

model:
  width: 640
  height: 640
  input_tensor: nhwc
  input_pixel_format: rgb
  input_dtype: int
  model_type: yolo-generic
  labelmap_path: /labelmap/coco-80.txt
  path: https://hailo-model-zoo.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/ModelZoo/Compiled/v5.2.0/hailo10h/yolov8m.hef

Step 3 — Install the Hailo VLM Chat Add-on

Add the repository:

Install “Hailo-10H VLM Chat”, disable Protection Mode, and configure your camera source in the add-on settings. Use an RTSP URL (e.g. rtsp://your-camera-ip:554/stream) or a USB device path (e.g. video0).

Place your VLM HEF model file in media on your HA instance, and you’re ready to go.
For example if you have the SSH add-on in Home Assistant:

scp ~/path-to/Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct.hef hass_user@hass_url:/tmp
ssh hass_user@hass_url "sudo mv /tmp/Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct.hef /media/"

Step 4 - Use them together

Both addons can run simultaneously. Frigate handles continuous detection while VLM Chat is available for on-demand visual queries - all on the same Hailo-10H.

WHAT’S NEXT?

This is the starting point. We’re sharing this with the community to:

  1. Demonstrate what Hailo-10H can do in a real smart home setup
  2. Enable early adopters to experiment and provide feedback
  3. Build toward upstream integration - the goal is for Hailo-10H support to eventually land in the official HAOS builds and Frigate releases, with a single OS image supporting both Hailo-8 and Hailo-10H
  4. Support non RPI installations.

We’d love to hear your experiences, ideas for automations, and any issues you run into. This is very much a collaborative effort.

Thanks,
Hailo Community Team

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