I bought a Coral accelerator for Frigate and couldn't get it to work — turns out I didn't need it anyway
Google Coral TPU accelerators were once the go-to recommendation for boosting Frigate NVR object detection performance, but the ecosystem has stagnated. Google's Edge TPU runtime, TensorFlow Lite compatibility, and drivers have become outdated and increasingly difficult to set up on modern Linux kernels. Meanwhile, Frigate v0.17 introduced CUDA Graphs for Nvidia GPUs and added Intel NPU support, making modern CPUs and discrete GPUs viable alternatives. Coral is still officially supported but no longer recommended for new setups. Better alternatives now include Intel OpenVINO, Nvidia GPUs, and the Hailo-8L accelerator, which is considered a modern successor to Coral for dedicated AI inference in home surveillance systems.