Arlo Cameras In Scenes, Automations, Help please

SmartApps & Automations Automation Ideas
1

HI I have 5 Arlo Camera’s (various models) and I have linked them all to ST.

Unfortunately, Arlo doesn’t have a feature to let you know if one of your camera’s goes offline, so I am making a substitute by using ST to record from each camera at a fixed time each day, just to make sure they are up and running.

So I made a scene called “camera check”, Action is the “camera>turn on>refresh>record”. then I used Automation to trigger the scene at 6.45am everyday and send me a text to say it’s done.

When I manually trigger the scene I get a tick - indicating success (I assumed) and when the time is triggered I get the notification - indicating success (again I assumed) but it would seem that in ST a tick/success is defined as the scene ran not the scene achieved its result/target action.

I always get a message saying it ran but I don’t always get a recording. Both when it’s triggered by an automation and / or when it’s manually triggered. I can work on that as I think the issue is trying to record too many camera’s simultaneously.

So here’s my question / issue. Is this how scene’s are supposed to work - a tick just means it executed not necessarily that it achieved its action outcome???

Any suggestions on how to improve the scene / automation to try and achieve my aim - are my camera’s online and working is always appreciated.
thanks, Sam

2

I don’t have any suggestions about your Automation, but I have a different way I’m monitoring the Arlo Cameras via SmartThings. I use a Device Monitor SmartApp set to 6 hours since that’s what the SmartThings engineer advised when the new Schema for SmartThings Arlo integration performs it’s ‘health check’. The idea with using the Device Monitor SmartApp is that as long as the Arlo Cameras are reporting something at least every 6 hours (like the health check), then the Device Monitor SmartApp is happy and doesn’t trigger any notification, otherwise it triggers a notification that the Arlo Camera devices have not reported.

So far, it’s worked both times the Arlo integration with SmartThings has went down and sent me a notification that the Arlo Cameras were not reporting. And when I looked both times, I saw that all the Arlo Cameras were showing offline in SmartThings so I had to refresh the Arlo linked service to get them back online with SmartThings.

I’m pretty sure it would work the other way around if something happened on the Arlo side of things since the SmartThings engineer said during the health check it looks at the battery level, and it can’t do that unless the Camera is online in Arlo’s ecosystem.

1 Like
3

Thank you that’s very interesting, are you able to paste a link to the app you are using, there seems to be a lot of device monitors in the play store and I want to get the same one…

In terms of “device” monitoring, is it each camera that you see as a “device” and monitor Or is it the smarthub “device” that you see and monitor?

Just curious what model camera’s do you have?

thanks, SAM

4

It’s a SmartThings SmartApp that I installed through the SmartThings IDE Website.

1 Like
5

thanks - lots of posts about IDE and its seems amazing - but way out of my league and can’t find any beginners guides or tutorials. So i need to stick with things that have a more beginner interface like sharptools or ST.

Do appreciate your reply, thanks SAM