Teaching the House to Announce the Mail Truck: A Zero-Shot CLIP Classifier on the Homelab

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted my house to say, out loud, “the mail truck is out front” — the moment the USPS truck pulls up, spoken through the same Home Assistant TTS pipeline that runs the rest of the place. Not “a vehicle was detected.” Specifically the mail truck.

The gap between those two sentences is the whole project. My NVR (Frigate) is very good at “there’s a truck in the driveway zone” and completely incapable of “that’s a USPS LLV.” Closing that gap meant adding a small second-stage classifier that looks at the snapshot Frigate already captured and decides what kind of truck it is — running on hardware I already own, with no cloud vision API. It ended up as a zero-shot CLIP classifier, and along the way it picked up a second job I never planned: catching the garbage truck too.

Piper on Linux Colorado

Teaching the House to Announce the Mail Truck: A Zero-Shot CLIP Classifier on the Homelab