hass-aarlo

New Features in 0.8

Split Out Pyaarlo

The code now uses pyaalo by installing it via pip rather than maintaining its own version. If you run into a problem check the pyaarlo README file, it may have a fix not mentioned here.

Authentication Caching

The code will retry authorization tokens for as long as they are valid. This means a reduction in authentication attempts and 2FA requests. If this does not work for you send me some logs and add restart with save_session: False to your configuration.

Saner Defaults

You will now have less to configure...

Breaking Changes in 0.8

The following options have been removed:

• hide_deprecated_services; all component services are now in the aarlo domain.
• http_connections; no longer used after cloudscraper was needed
• http_max_size; no longer used after cloudscraper was needed

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Configuration
  • Moving from Arlo
  • Creating a Login
  • Main Configuration
  • Alarm Configuration
  • Camera Configuration
  • Binary Sensor Configuration
  • Sensor Configuration
  • Light Configuration
  • Switch Configuration
  • Media Player Configuration
  • Custom Lovelace Card Configuration
• 2-Factor Authentication
  • IMAP
  • PUSH
• Other
  • Naming
  • Saving Media
  • Streaming
  • Snapshots
  • User Agents
  • Adding Devices
  • Best Practises and Known Limitations
• It's Not Working!
  • Cloud Flare
  • Missing Events
  • Missing/Incorrect Values
  • Enabling and Examining Logs
  • Bug Reports
    • Hiding Sensitive Data
  • Reverse Engineering
• Advanced Use
  • All Parameters
  • Camera Statuses
  • Services
  • Web Sockets
  • Automation Examples
• To Do

Introduction

Aarlo is an Asynchronous Arlo component for Home Assistant, it uses the Arlo Website APIs and supports base stations, cameras, lights and doorbells.

Aarlo is based on the original Arlo component and it can operate as replacement with minimal configuration changes.

Aarlo also provides a custom Lovelace Card, which overlays a camera's last snapshot with its current status and allows access to the cameras recording library and live-streaming.

Features

Aarlo provides:

• Access to cameras, base stations, sirens, doorbells and lights.
• Asynchronous, almost immediate, notification of motion, sound and button press events.
• Ability to view library recordings, take snapshots and direct stream from cameras.
• Tracking of environmental stats from certain base station types.
• Special switches to trip alarms and take snapshots from cameras.
• Enhanced state notifications.
• Media player support for select devices.

Notes

This document assumes you are familiar with Home Assistant setup and configuration.

Wherever you see /config in this document it refers to your Home Assistant configuration directory. For example, for my installation it's /home/steve/ha which is mapped to /config by my docker container.

Thanks

Many thanks to:

• Pyarlo and Arlo for doing all the hard work figuring the API out and the free Python lesson!

• sseclient for reading from the event stream

• Button Card for a working lovelace card I could understand

• JetBrains for the excellent PyCharm IDE and providing me with an open source license to speed up the project development.

  

Installation

You only need to use one of these installation mechanisms. I recommend HACS.

HACS

Aarlo is part of the default HACS store. If you're not interested in development branches this is the easiest way to install.

Manually

Copy the aarlo directory into your /config/custom_components directory.

From Script

Run the installation script. Run it once to make sure the operations look sane and run it a second time with the go paramater to do the actual work. If you update just rerun the script, it will overwrite all installed files.

install /config
# check output looks good
install go /config

Configuration

Moving From Arlo

You can replace all instances of arlo with aarlo in your Home Assistant configuration files to start using Aarlo. The following sections detail new configuration items you can use to add extra functionality to your new Aarlo component.

You can also run Arlo and Aarlo side by side but you will need to create an Aarlo specific login.

Creating a Login

If you are replacing the original Arlo component you don't need to do this step.

Aarlo needs a dedicated Aarlo login. If you try to reuse an existing login - for example, the login from the Arlo app on your phone - the app and this component will constantly fight to log in.

When you have created the Aarlo login, from your original Arlo account grant access to any devices you want to share and give the Aarlo user admin access.

Main Configuration

The following configuration is the minimim needed.

aarlo:
  username: !secret arlo_username
  password: !secret arlo_password

The following configuration adds some connection keep alive mechanisms to try to work around limitations in using the Arlo web API.

aarlo:
  username: !secret arlo_username
  password: !secret arlo_password
  refresh_devices_every: 2
  stream_timeout: 120

• refresh_devices_every tells the code to reload the device list every 2 hours.
• stream_timeout tells the event stream to restart after 2 minutes of inactivity.

If you still struggle with connectivity you can add the following:

  reconnect_every: 90

• reconnect_every force the system to logout and log back in, in this case every 90 minutes.

Alarm Configuration

The following enables and configures the base stations.

alarm_control_panel:
  - platform: aarlo
    away_mode_name: armed
    home_mode_name: home
    night_mode_name: night
    trigger_time: 30
    alarm_volume: 8

• away_mode_name Arlo mode to use when setting alarm to Armed Away. Default value is armed which maps to Arlo's default Armed mode.
• disarmed_mode_name Arlo mode to use when setting alarm to Disarmed. Default value is disarmed which maps to Arlo's default Disarmed mode.
• home_mode_name Arlo mode to use when setting alarm to Armed Home. Default value home.
• night_mode_name Arlo mode to use when setting alarm to Armed Night. Default value night.
• trigger_time determines how long, in seconds, the triggered alarm will sound
• alarm_volume determine how loud, from 1 to 8, the triggered alarm will sound

Arlo does not have a built in home or night mode. If you need them create a custom mode in Arlo and home_mode_name and night_mode_name to map to them. You don't need to map all modes - I don't use night_mode. Names are case-insensitive. Using duplicate names will cause problems, for example, mapping both away and night mode to armed will work when setting the mode from Home Assistant but might not show the correct mode if you change it in the Arlo app.

See here for more information on mode names.

Camera Configuration

The following enables any cameras.

camera:
  - platform: aarlo

Binary Sensor Configuration

The following enables and configures the binary sensors.

binary_sensor:
  - platform: aarlo
    monitored_conditions:
    - motion
    - sound
    - ding
    - cry
    - connectivity

Items on the monitored_conditions can be one or more of the following:

• motion fires when a camera, doorbell or light detects motion.
• sound fires when a camera detects a sound.
• ding fires when a doorbell is pressed.
• cry fires when crying is detected (ArloBaby only)
• connectivity is true when Arlo a device is connected

The Arlo backend sends the notifications on the event stream so they are (almost) real time.

Sensor Configuration

The following enables and configures the sensors.

sensor:
  - platform: aarlo
    monitored_conditions:
    - total_cameras
    - last_capture
    - recent_activity
    - captured_today
    - battery_level
    - signal_strength
    - temperature
    - humidity
    - air_quality

Items on the monitored_conditions can be one or more of the following:

• total_cameras is a global sensor showing the number of cameras detected.

The rest of the sensors appear per camera.

• last_capture The last time an event was captured by this camera.
• recent_activity Is on if activity was recently seen on the camera.
• captured_today The number of events captured by the camera today.
• battery_level The percentage of battery remaining.
• signal_strength The Wi-Fi signal strength of the camera.
• temperature The temperature in the room where the camera is, if supported.
• humidity The humidity in the room where the camera is, if supported.
• air_quality The air quality in the room where the camera is, if supported.

If you have an Arlo Smart plan the 'last_capture' sensor has the attribute 'object_type' containing what Arlo cloud service believes to have identified as a string ("Person", "Vehicle", "Animal", ...). You can use templating in HA to trigger or condition automations based on this or record the info using an additional template sensor.

Light Configuration

The following enables any lights:

light:
  - platform: aarlo

The component supports the standard Arlo lights, Arlo Baby lights and Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight. There is one noticable quirk, you can adjust the brightness of a light while it is on but the change will not happen until you turn the light off and back on again. This how the official web interface works.

This does not apply to the Pro 3 Floodlight as the brightness can be changed while it is turned on.

Switch Configuration

The following enables and configures some pseudo switches:

switch:
  - platform: aarlo
    siren: True
    all_sirens: True
    snapshot: True
    doorbell_silence: True
    siren_volume: 1
    siren_duration: 10

• siren If True, will create a switch for each siren device that allows you to turn it on or off.
• all_sirens If True, will create a switch for all the siren devices that allows you to turn them all on and off.
• snapshot If True, will create a switch for each camera to allow you to take a snapshot.
• doorbell_silence If True, will create two switches for each doorbell, to allow silencing of chimes alone, or both chimes and calls.

siren_volume and siren_duration controls how loud, from 1 to 10, the siren is and how long, in seconds, it sounds.

Media Player Configuration

The following enables media player for supported devices:

media_player:
  - platform: aarlo

Custom Lovelace Card Configuration

A custom Lovelace card which is based on the picture-glance can be found here: https://github.com/twrecked/lovelace-hass-aarlo

The custom Lovelace card allows access to the video recordings library and presents customizable camera information on the camera feed. It was influenced by the Arlo web interface camera view.

This piece is optional, aarlo will work with the standard Lovelace cards.

2FA

aarlo supports 2-factor authentication.

To check if you need to enable 2FA, log in to Arlo using your Home Assistant account and see if it sends you a verification code. If it does, you will need to provide a mechanism to get this code, choose one of the following:

IMAP

For IMAP 2FA Arlo needs to access and your email account form where it reads the token Arlo sent.

aarlo:
  tfa_source: imap
  tfa_type: email
  tfa_host: imap.host.com
  tfa_username: your-user-name
  tfa_password: your-imap-password

If needed, you can specify a port by appending it to the host.

aarlo:
  tfa_source: imap
  tfa_type: email
  tfa_host: imap.host.com:1234
  tfa_username: your-user-name
  tfa_password: your-imap-password

Application Passwords

For GMail, Yahoo (and other web based email client) you can't log in with your usual password, you will have to create an application specific password. Explaining why this is necessary is out of the scope of this document so see the following pages.

• Gmail App Password
• Yahoo App Password

If you find you can't log in to your IMAP account check the application password requirement.

Once you have created the application password use it in the 2FA configuration.

For GMail the set-up would look like this:

aarlo:
  ..other config..
  tfa_source: imap
  tfa_type: email
  tfa_host: imap.gmail.com
  tfa_username: !secret gmail_username
  tfa_password: !secret gmail_app_password

PUSH

PUSH 2FA Arlo is used when account is set for 2FA to phone app.

aarlo:
  tfa_source: push
  tfa_type: PUSH
  tfa_retries: 5 # optional: default 5; attempts to check for push approved
  tfa_delay: 5 # optional: default 5; seconds of delay between retries

Other

Naming

Entity ID naming follows this pattern component-type.aarlo_lower_case_name_with_underscores.

For example, a camera called "Front Door" will have an entity id of camera.aarlo_front_door.

For full compabilty aarlo will decode unicode characters. This means a camera called Haustür will be called component-type.aarlo_haustur.

If you do not want this behaviour - and be warned, this may cause problems using certain HA services - add no_unicode_squash: True to your configuration.

Saving Media

If you use the save_media_to parameter to specify a file naming scheme aarlo will use that to save all media - videos and snapshots - locally. You can use the following substitutions:

• SN; the device serial number
• N; the device name
• Y; the year of the recording, include century
• m; the month of the year as a number (range 01 to 12)
• d; the day of the month as a number (range 01 to 31)
• H; the hour of the day (range 00 to 23)
• M; the minute of the hour (range 00 to 59)
• S; the seconds of the minute (range 00 to 59)
• F; a shortcut for Y-m-d
• T; a shortcut for H:M:S
• t; a shortcut for H-M-S
• s; the number of seconds since the epoch

You specify the substitution by prefixing it with a $ in the format string. You can optionally use curly brackets to remove any ambiguity. For example, the following configuration will save all media under /config/media organised by serial number and then by date. The code will add the correct file extension.

  save_media_to: "/config/media/${SN}/${Y}/${m}/${d}/${T}"

The first time you configure save_media_to the system can take several minutes to download all the currently available media. The download is throttled to not overload Home Assistant or Arlo. Once the initial download is completed updates should happen a lot faster.

The code doesn't provide any management of the downloads, it will keep downloading them until your device is full. It also doesn't provide a NAS interface, you need to mount the NAS device and point save_media_to at it.

Streaming

You need to use the custom `aarlo-glance card. And you need to do one or both of these:

• add stream to the image_click options of the card
• add stream to the image_top or image_bottom options of the card

Streaming works with Home Assistant and, for most people, will just work. But there are still some things to be wary of.

Direct Streaming

Arlo recently upgraded their streaming servers to support mpeg-dash. You can stream this directly to your browser without going through your Home Assistant install.

One of the biggest advantages of direct streaming was audio support but that has been added to non-direct streaming in recent Home Assistant releases. Direct streaming still offloads the conversion from your Home Assistant server and reduces the bandwidth usage of your home network, this is especially true if streaming from outside your home network.

You can not stream directly to Apple devices, they don't support mpeg-dash.

Internally the code will use non-direct streaming as needed. For example, to save recording into the Arlo library of longer than 30 seconds the code must open a stream to the Arlo servers, it can only do this in non-direct mode because the stream component doesn't support mpeg-dash.

To use it on your aarlo-glance card you need to add direct to the image_view options of the card. You can mix direct and non-direct cards on the UI.

Virtual Env

To get streaming working in virtualenv you still need to make sure a couple of libraries are installed. For ubuntu the following works:

source your-env/bin/activate
sudo apt install libavformat-dev
sudo apt install libavdevice-dev
pip install av==6.1.2

Further Help

If you are still having issues please read these 3 posts:

• https://github.com/twrecked/hass-aarlo/issues/55
• https://community.home-assistant.io/t/arlo-replacement-pyarlo-module/93511/293
• https://community.home-assistant.io/t/arlo-replacement-pyarlo-module/93511/431?u=sherrell

Snapshots

Snapshots can be tricky.

The initial implementation would issue a fullFrameSnapshot request and Arlo would return a snapshot. The problem was it wasn't very consistent, I have 2 identical cameras where snapshot will work on one and not the other. Arlo uses this implementation to allow you to position the camera and I've seen it not work on their web interface and app.

The next implementation would start a stream and issues a snapshot command - mimicking the camera button show on the live stream on the web interface. Again, this mostly worked but some cameras would steadfastly refuse to send back a snapshot.

The latest version adds to the previous stream version by allowing the updated thumbnail from the stream to be used as the snapshot image. This method works best but there are still some pieces of configuration you can tweak to make it better.

• stream_snapshot; set to True to turn on stream snapshots, default False.
• stream_snapshot_stop; a positive integer, the number of seconds to stop the stream after starting it for a snapshot, default 10. This can help speed up cameras that won't send a snapshot on request. Setting it to 0 will let Arlo stop the stream when it thinks it has become idle.
• snapshot_checks; an integer array, default values 1 and 5. Force Aarlo to do a media library check to see if the snapshot has appeared. Useful when systems fail to send mediaUploadNotifications.
• snapshot_timeout; a positive integer, default 60. How long to give the snapshot to appear before stopping everything.

This is a summary of possible sizes:

*And I know up until about 2 weeks ago this row was working.

street is an original Arlo (VMC3030) front is an Arlo Pro (VMC4030P)

User Agents

The following user agents are available:

• arlo; the original netgear use agent, this is the default and will get rtsps streams from the Arlo servers.
• linux; a newer Chrome user agent, this will get mpeg-dash streams from the Arlo servers.
• apple, ipad, iphone, mac, firefox; these simulate these devices or browsers and, for now, these return mpeg_dash streams.

As you can see, the user agent you supply to Arlo determines what streaming format is used. I used to think that the agent you used to log in had to be the same as the agent you use to start a stream. After some testing I find this is not the case.

What this means is aarlo can select the best user agent for the task.

• The camera.record service will use arlo agent so Home Assistant can save the stream as mp4.
• The camera.play_stream service will use arlo agent so Home Assistant can convert the stream to hls.
• The arlo_stream_url web service will use the linux agent to return a URL to an mpeg-dash stream.

Those camera.play_stream and arlo_stream_url changes are important, they allow the aarlo-glance Lovelace card to choose direct or non-direct streams regardless of the default user agent provided.

The default user agent is used in all other cases. This means, for example, the one you set if picked for snapshot operations.

Best Practises and Known Limitations

The component uses the Arlo webapi.

• There is no documentation so the API has been reverse engineered using browser debug tools.
• Streaming times out after 30 minutes.
• The webapi doesn't seem like it was really designed for permanent connections so the system will sometimes appear to lock up. Various workarounds are in the code and can be configured at the arlo component level. See next paragraph.

If you do find the component locks up after a while (I've seen reports of hours, days or weeks), you can add the following to the main configuration. Start from the top and work down:

• refresh_devices_every, tell Aarlo to request the device list every so often. This will sometimes prevent the back end from aging you out. The value is in hours and a good starting point is 3.
• stream_timeout, tell Aarlo to close and reopen the event stream after a certain period of inactivity. Aarlo will send keep alive every minute so a good starting point is 180 seconds.
• reconnect_every, tell Aarlo to logout and back in every so often. This establishes a new session at the risk of losing an event notification. The value is minutes and a good starting point is 90.
• request_timeout, the amount of time to allow for a http request to work. A good starting point is 120 seconds.

Unify your alarm mode names across all your base stations. There is no way to specify different mode names for each device.

Arlo will allow shared accounts to give cameras their own name. If you find cameras appearing with unexpected names (or not appearing at all), log into the Arlo web interface with your Home Assistant account and make sure the camera names are correct.

You can change the brightness on the light but not while it's turned on. You need to turn it off and back on again for the change to take. This is how the web interface does it.

Adding Devices

Coming soon...

It's Not Working

Cloud Flare

Arlo recently added Cloud Flare anti-bot protection to the Arlo website. This service doesn't work well with the Python Requests package. If you see the following errors you are running into Cloud Flare issues.

2021-06-03 13:28:32 WARNING (SyncWorker_4) [pyaarlo] request-error=CloudflareChallengeError

There are a couple of things you can try:

• Change your user_agent and restart HA. You can even try setting the user_agent to random if things get desperate.
• Modify /etc/hosts to point to a specific Arlo web server. You can try adding the following and changing which entry you comment out.

#104.18.30.98 ocapi-app.arlo.com
#104.18.31.98 ocapi-app.arlo.com

The good news, aarlo will now cache the authentication token so once you've logged in you should be not need to be bothered by Cloud Flare for 2 weeks.

This problem affects me, and I'm constantly trying to refine the code.

Missing Events

Arlo is in the middle of (or seems to be in the middle of) changing their back end event system. The original system used a Server Side Event socket but they now support a MQTT broker system. The problem aarlo can't currently automatically determine which to use.

By default, the system will use the MQTT back end. If aren't seeing the events you expect to see then try changing to the Server Side Event back end. Add this to your configuration and restart the system.

aarlo:
  ..your current config..
  backend: sse

If that doesn't help then you will need to turn on logging and examine the output.

Once you have the logs look for the event you are missing at around the time you are expecting it. The events are usually helpfully named, i.e. motionDetected for motion events, batteryLevel for battery levels.

Missing/Incorrect Values

See Missing Events, they share a lot of the same issues.

And make sure you have admin enabled for your secondary account. Arlo won't update some values for admin accounts.

Enabling and Examining Logs

I might also ask you to turn on component logging and event logging. The follow paragraphs show you how, it's safe to leave these running if you fancy poking around and trying to find out what is going wrong.

• Component logging. You can turn this on by adding the following to your configuration.yaml file.

logger:
  default: info
  logs:
    ..any current logs you have enabled..
    custom_components.aarlo: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.alarm_control_panel: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.binary_sensor: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.camera: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.light: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.media_player: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.sensor: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.switch: debug
    pyaarlo: debug

If, for example, you suspect the problem is just with your lights you can remove
unneeded debug:

logger:
  default: info
  logs:
    custom_components.aarlo: debug
    custom_components.aarlo.light: debug
    pyaarlo: debug

Home assistant logs everything to `/config/home-assistant.log`, a typical piece of
debug from Aarlo looks like this.

2020-01-21 11:44:48 DEBUG (ArloBackgroundWorker) [pyaarlo] fast refresh
2020-01-21 11:44:48 DEBUG (ArloBackgroundWorker) [pyaarlo] day testing with 2020-01-21!
2020-01-21 11:44:50 DEBUG (ArloEventStream) [pyaarlo] async ping response subscriptions/XXXXXX-XXX-XXXXXXX_web

Once you have the logs look for the event you are missing at around the time you are expecting it. The events are usually helpfully named, i.e. motionDetected for motion events, batteryLevel for battery levels. You can look RESOURCE_KEYS and RESOURCE_UPDATE_KEYS in constant.py for a list of recognised event types.

If you can't see the entries you expect then look for any traceBack happening in an aarlo component. This will indicate a program crash and can usually be the reason for missing events.

If you still can't see the events your expecting then open a bug report and include the logs.

• Event logging. You can look at what events Arlo is sending you by turning on event stream dumping. Add the following to your configuration.yaml file and Aarlo will dump events into /config/.aarlo/packets.dump:

aarlo:
    # current config here
    packet_dump: True

This file will be built up from a constant trickle of packets from Arlo. The following excerpt shows a login confirmation and a subscription check response.

{'status': 'connected'}
{ 'action': 'is',
    'from': 'XXXXXXXXXXXXX',
    'resource': 'subscriptions/XXXXXX-XXX-XXXXXXX_web',
    'to': 'XXXXXX-XXX-XXXXXXX_web',
    'transId': 'web!38a29262-1ce0-4c4d-8f75-fafec2c34332'}

Another example, if Arlo detects motion you will see a packet with the following field
in it:

'properties': {'motionDetected': True},

This information will normally be present in the component logging, if it's missing from there that could indicate an issue.

Bug Reports

If you run into problems there please provide the following in the bug report to help debugging.

• Version of software running.
• Make of cameras and base stations you have.
• What you were doing or expecting
• Include debug logs if available.

Hiding Sensitive Data

If you paste any debug logs into GitHub it's a good idea to encrypt them before uploading them. You can do this one of two ways.

Online

You can encrypt your output on this webpage.

This page doesn't forward the output to me, so you will have to copy and paste it into a bug report.

Pyaarlo

You can do this using the pyaarlo component. The easiest way to install it is in a virtual environment. The following steps will install Pyaarlo.

$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.6 pyaarlo
$ source pyaarlo/bin/activate
(pyaarlo) $ pip install git+https://github.com/twrecked/pyaarlo
(pyaarlo) $ pyaarlo --help

To encrypt your logs save the output to a file and do the following:

(pyaarlo)$ cat your-log-file | pyaarlo encrypt

The output will look like this - only longer! Paste everything, including the BEGIN and END lines into your bug report.

-----BEGIN PYAARLO DUMP-----
gAN9cQAoWAEAAABucQFCAAEAAJJ7SWmo+vX28ycatrCV2s1o0wiIo3SPVOaRkHBf6xVup2D/cdZI
nvim30f/oTNwkuspbwYTwOzXHZJygnsi/9vX4+5g65te+bJczzVl6hoBM+2uaNfFi63iL0blMv32
zwTZHPj7TxwcJbdOGuP+A+yqEpxPbIsI/8nUP9CLvE01cxje+a7swgUdidoPTAAPSjjteGWl/h+V
DMX8UcDPtN+fdYOyEVlVOoFPQC4u/xXjN0qusfW0yNqpKHzD82Vkz0Igc5USXCRsbAs1YNgnZgXt
KWwDrH5v31jNd6zppaF5EtgfnyDsUohzqYy0bciXfD0HAQS/6sbT+sSaRf39q7pxAlgBAAAAb3ED
QyDC4o3xjAKAA4pGGxzZ7zyUP7nU6QgiqDD1aYi7C6SzcnEEdS4=
-----END PYAARLO DUMP-----

Notes

Data isn't anonymised internally... I will be adding that functionality.

You don't need to keep re-installing pyaarlo, just re-activate the virtualenv.

$ cd where-you-where-before
$ source pyaarlo/bin/activate
(pyaarlo) $ pyaarlo --help

When you're finished with pyaarlo deactivate the virtualenv.

(pyaarlo) $ deactivate
$

Reverse Engineering

Coming soon...

Advanced Use

All Parameters

The following additional parameters can be specified against the aarlo platform for more granular control:

Camera Statuses

The following camera statuses are reported:

• Idle camera is doing nothing
• Turned Off user has turned the camera off
• Recording camera has detected something and is recording
• Streaming camera is streaming live video to another other login
• Taking Snapshot camers is updating the thumbnail
• Recently Active camera has seen activity within the last few minutes
• Too Cold! the camera is shutdown until it warms up

Services

The component provides the following services:

For recordings longer than 30 seconds you will need to whitelist the /tmp directory. This is because we have to keep a stream to Arlo open to prevent them from stopping the recording after 30 seconds. And we write this stream to the /tmp directory.

For restart_device you need to log in with the main account.

These services are deprecated and will be going away. By moving services under the aarlo domain it allows Home Assistant to use the services.yaml descriptions.

Events

The following events can fire:

The following events are deprecated:

Web Sockets

The component provides the following extra web sockets:

Automation Examples

Update camera snapshot 3 seconds after a recording event happens

- id: 'automation-0100'
  alias: Camera Snapshot
  trigger:
  - entity_id: camera.aarlo_camera1,camera.aarlo_camera2
    for: 00:00:03
    from: 'idle'
    platform: state
    to: 'recording'
  - entity_id: camera.aarlo_camera1,camera.aarlo_camera2
    for: 00:00:03
    from: 'recently active'
    platform: state
    to: 'recording'
  condition: []
  action:
  - data_template:
      entity_id: "{{ trigger.entity_id }}"
    service: camera.aarlo_request_snapshot

Begin recording when an entity changes state

- id: 'automation-0101'
  alias: Record video when garage opens
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - entity_id: cover.garage_door
    platform: state
    to: open
  condition: []
  action:
  - data:
      duration: 300
      entity_id: camera.aarlo_garage
    service: camera.aarlo_start_recording

To Do

• smarter light brightness...
• coloured lights
• custom mode - like SmartThings to better control motion detection
• use asyncio loop internally