Home security use case, best practice (?)

I have one ArloQ camera, one door sensor, one Schlag connect lock and Leviton light switches.
I also installed the custom Lock Manager [RELEASE] Lock Manager aoo for the Schlag lock.

Use case: I want to make a light weight home security use case with the following characteristics

  1. Get notifications (push, emails) when the system is “armed”
  2. Sound siren
  3. Record video

I thought that using the home security feature may be easier than making all the states manually… I got it to easily trigger lights (as a test, I am about to get a siren) based on door sensor or motion trigger, but my question is, what is the best practice for:

  1. Auto disarm the alarm (move to disarm state) when I enter the right keycode in the keypad
  2. Auto arm when I leave the house (geo location).
    2_1. What if I want it to arm only when both me and my wife are not at home? for whatever reason, I can only see me in the list of “things” though I added my wife as a user and she accepted.
  3. If anyone has experience with the Arlo Q, also would like to know if they use the ST app integrated or they kept it not connected to ST. With the ST integration, it is less clear to me when it is armed and when not (while using the Arlo app it is super clear). i.e. I think the use case of using it as a motion detection is cool, but I think its own way of triggering video recording is pretty good, not sure if I loose that when I do ST integration…

I saw that I can start a routine from the “on-unlock” lock manager, but is that really what people do (routine seems so general and easy to trigger by mistake…)

Last question: I

  1. You should be able to use this to get responses from smartthings when you disarm door lock.
    [RELEASE] Lock Manager

  2. You might not have added her phone as a device yet. Go to add a thing. Then click on add device manually, then go to sensors, then to presence sensor, then you will see mobile phone. And do this with her phone and her phone should show up.
    To auto arm there are a few ways. But I personally feel like using Webcore is your best bet. It will allow you to create any automation you can think of for the most part. Has a bit of a learning period though. But the new webcore is pretty simple and quick compared to the old one. FYI webcore is still being worked on so not completely finished but is in beta testing and a lot of people including myself have already started to use it heavily.
    [DEPRECATED] webCoRE Beta Milestone 2

  3. I don’t own arlo myself but I have read on here that you can set it up however you want pretty much. But I don’t want to say too much and give you false information.

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Thanks @Squidward, especially for #2, you easily solved that one for me. Will need to continue researching 1 based on your info, but that was a big help.

For arlo Q I may need a dedicated topic to find the few angles that are veteran users and can give me the best practice there. I am still getting way too many notifications and can’t find the right balance to let them coexist (so switched to having arlo on its own)

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