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An Arlo Home Assistant Integration

Aarlo is a custom component for Home Assistant, that provides access to the Arlo system.

Aarlo provides, amongst other things:

• 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.

Table Of Contents

• An Arlo Home Assistant Integration
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
  • Notes
  • Thanks
  • See Also
• Requirements
• Installing the Integration
  • HACS
  • Manually
  • From Script
• Adding and Configuring the Integration
  • Further Configuration
    • Alarm Setting Screen
    • Binary Sensors Screen
    • Sensors Screen
    • Switches Screen
• Coming From Earlier Versions
• Advanced Configuration
  • Back Ends
    • How it Works
    • Configuration
  • Cloud Flare
    • How We Work Around This
    • Configuration
  • Two Factor Authentication
    • IMAP
      • Application Passwords
      • IMAP Servers
    • PUSH
    • Configuration
• Bug Reports
  • What to Include
  • Enabling Debug
  • Encrypting the Output
• Reverse Engineering
  • Figuring out what Aarlo Needs to Do
  • MQTT Stream
  • SSE Stream
  • Supporting New Features
• FAQ
• Supported Devices
• Known Limitations

Introduction

Aarlo is a custom component for Home Assistant, that provides access to the Arlo system.

The integration uses the APIs provided by the Arlo Camera Website and there are several limitations to this. See the Known Limitations section for further details.

If you encounter an issue then look at the FAQ section to see if it has a known problem and has a workaround or fix. If not, look at the Bug Report section for information on how to generate debug logs and create a debug report.

The advanced README is here

The old README is still available here.

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.

Wherever you see Arlo it refers to any piece of the Arlo system.

Wherever you see Aarlo I'm referring to this component.

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 licence to speed up the project development.

See Also

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.

If you aren't familiar with Home Assistant I recommend visiting the Community Website. It's full of helpful people and there is always someone who's encountered the problem you are trying to fix.

Requirements

Aarlo needs a dedicated Arlo account. If you try to reuse an existing account, for example, the one you use on the Arlo app on your phone, the app and this integration will constantly fight to log in. This is an Arlo limitation.

The dedicated Aarlo account needs Allow Access Rights to be enabled to set the alarm levels and read certain status values.

See the Arlo documentation for further instructions.

You need to enable two factor authentication. Set up an email address to receive the verification code. Aarlo supports other TFA mechanisms but email is the easiest to use. See the Two Factor Authentication section later for more details.

Installing the Integration

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 using 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 parameter 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

Adding and Configuring the Integration

However you install the source code you know need to add the integration into Home Assistant. From the home page select Settings -> Devices & Services, from here click ADD INTEGRATION and search for Aarlo. On the first screen enter your account details.

If you leave Use aarlo prefix checked all your devices will be of the format type.aarlo_*.

Click SUBMIT. The integration will log into Arlo and retrieve the list of devices associated with it. If it all works you will be able to assign the devices to rooms on the the next screen.

Further Configuration

You can fine tune the settings further. From the Integration page click CONFIGURE.

Alarm Setting Screen

Fine tune the alarm settings:

Night Mode; Arlo will not have one of these unless you create it

If you need to clear the alarm code enter no code needed. I will look to make this accept a blank entry...

Binary Sensors Screen

Determine which binary sensors are available:

Not all sensors are available on all devices.

Sensors Screen

Determine which sensors are available:

Not all sensors are available on all devices. And recent activity should probably be a binary_sensor.

Switches Screen

Enable miscellaneous switches:

Coming From Earlier Versions

If you are coming from an early there are several things to note:

• Your configuration will be imported into the config flow mechanism. All your devices will appear on the integration page.
• You will not be able to change your login or TFA settings without deleting the Intergration.
• You will be able to fine tune with the Further Configuration settings.
• You can comment out the original yaml entries.
• The import enables the prefix with _aarlo to keep the naming identical.
• All component services are now in the aarlo domain.
• The pyaarlo component is now installed via pip and not included with the Integration.
• You may experience log in difficulties, if you do try deleting .aarlo/session.pickle.

I wasn't willing to move some of the more esoteric configuration items into the config flow mechanisms, if you had any configured they will appear in the /config/aarlo.yaml file. See here for more on these options.

Advanced Configuration

Back Ends

Arlo will use either SSE or MQTT to signal events to Aarlo. I'm not fully sure of the mechanism which determines which gets chosen but I know adding or removing a user_agent will switch between the two.

How it Works

Arlo recently updated the response they send to the session/v3 API requests to indicate which back end to choose. Aarlo will parse that out when using auto.

# This is the MQTT backend. We use the host and port.
'mqttUrl': 'ssl://mqtt-cluster-z1.arloxcld.com:8883'

# This is the SSE backend. We use a fixed host and port.
'mqttUrl': 'wss://mqtt-cluster-z1.arloxcld.com:8084'

If you enable verbose debugging your should be able to find this value in the Home Assistant logs.

Configuration

Starting with the 0.8 release Aarlo should be smart enough to work out which back end to use. But if you find yourself running into problems, like missing motion detection events or missing sensor value updates you can manually override the setting. Change this setting in /config/aarlo.yaml.

aarlo:
  # This forces the SSE backend
  backend: sse

aarlo:
  # This forces the MQTT backend
  backend: mqtt
  # These might also be needed
  mqtt_hostname_check: false
  mqtt_host: mqtt-cluster-z1.arloxcld.com

aarlo:
  # This forces Aarlo to choose
  backend: auto

Note, removing the setting is equivalent to auto.

Cloud Flare

Arlo uses Cloud Flare anti-bot protection to the Arlo website login. This service doesn't work well with the Python Requests package (or how Aarlo uses those requests, I'm not too sure).

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  

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

How We Work Around This

Aarlo does several things to work around this:

• It uses the cloudscraper module to wrap the login requests to Arlo. After the login is complete cloudscraper is not needed.
• It mimics the official website requests as closely as possible, down to the Header level.
• It will cache successful login credentials for up to 2 weeks so when you restart Home Assistant Aarlo won't need to login again.

Configuration

But, if you are still seeing login issues there are several configuration items you can try.

You can try a different user agent. This is configured in /config/aarlo.yaml:

aarlo:
  # Change the user agent. It can be either arlo, iphone, ipad, mac, firefox or linux
  #  or random. random will change it each time it tries to login
  user_agent: linux

  # Or use a custom user agent, everything after the ! will be used
  user_agent: !this-is-a-custom-user-agent

You can add a Source header along with the login request. I have one site that needs this and one that doesn't. I think it might be user agent related.

aarlo:
  # This adds the following header "Source: arloCamWeb"
  send_source: true

You can disable session caching with the following:

aarlo:
  # This will force a full login on every restart
  save_session: false

You can select different ecdh curves to use. This topic is out of the scope of this document, see here for an explanation.

aarlo:
  # Make this curve the first choice. You can only enter 1 choice.
  ecdh_curve: secp384r1

You can modify /etc/hosts to point to a specific Arlo web server

# Remove the # to force the request to go to a particular cloudflare server
#104.18.30.98 ocapi-app.arlo.com  
#104.18.31.98 ocapi-app.arlo.com  

Two Factor Authentication

Arlo calls this Two-step Verification. You are going to need to enable this for your Home Assistant specific account. Aarlo support IMAP and PUSH mechanisms but I recommend using IMAP, with PUSH you need to manually respond to the login request.

You will find instructions for setting up two factor authentication here Arlo provide here

You enter two factor authentication when you add the integration.

IMAP

Follow the two factor authentication instructions and add and set up an Email verification method. You can test this by logging into the main Arlo web page and making sure it sends you an email.

Application Passwords

For Gmail and 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.

IMAP Servers

The following servers are known to work:

PUSH

Follow the two factor authentication instructions and add and set up a PUSH verification method.

Configuration

If you need to change the cipher list passed to the IMAP client you specify it with the following option. You shouldn't need to do this. see the openssl man page for more information.

aarlo:
  # specify cipher list to use
  cipher_list: "HIGH:!DH:!aNULL"

  # Use DEFAULT for the cipher list
  default_ciphers: True

Bug Reports

What to Include

If you run into problems please create a bug report, include the following information in the bug report to help debugging. If you don't I'll just pester you until you do.

• The version of Home Assistant you are running.
• The version of Aarlo you are running, just saying latest isn't adequate.
• Make of cameras or device you are having problems.
• What you were doing or expecting.
• Include debug logs if available.

Enabling Debug

You turn on basic Aarlo debugging by changing the logging setting in configuration.yaml.

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

You can turn on verbose debugging by enabling logging and adding the following to /config/aarlo.yaml as well. Verbose debug will generate a lot of logs so it's best to enable only while needed.

aarlo:
  verbose_debug: true

Aarlo will write the debug logs to the standard Home Assistant log file /config/home-assistant.log.

Encrypting the Output

Before you send me the debug you should encrypt it. You can encrypt your output on this web page. You can upload the file or copy and paste it into the buffer then press Submit.

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

This page will obscure the logs so only I can read them, I'm the sole possessor of the private key to decrypt it, but be wary, along with serial number it might include your account and password information. You can obscure those before encrypting, I never need them.

Reverse Engineering

Figuring out what Aarlo Needs to Do

I don't own every piece Arlo of equipment so sometimes, when things go wrong or new equipment is released, I need to see what Arlo actually expects this code to send and what this code can expect back from Arlo. Aarlo simulates a web browser connection so you can find out what is expected by using the browser Developer Tools.

This instructions are for Chrome but most browsers (I hope!) have similar functionality.

• Open your browser.
• Go to the Arlo camera website.
• With the Arlo website open enable you browser's developer tools. On Chrome you click the three dots in the upper right corner, then select More Tools and finally select Developer Tools. You can also use the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+I.
• Select the Network tab in the newly opened window.
• Now log in to the Arlo website.

When you log in the data passed between the browser and Arlo website will start to appear, and keep appearing, in this tab. If you click on an entry under Name you can examine the packets in more detail.

• The Headers tab shows you what was sent in the headers of the request.
• The Payload tabs shows you what was sent in the body of the request
• The Preview tab shows the reply sent back from Arlo.

If you hover over the field under name a pop up will display the full URL the request was sent to.

MQTT Stream

I need to document this.

SSE Stream

Look for a URL containing the word subscribe, this will be the even stream Arlo sends back to the web page. As you click buttons on the web page more items will appear in this list. I can use this information to determine how to parse response packets for cases I don't yet handle.

Supporting New Features

For example, Arlo creates a new device with a WOOHOO button, I don't posses such a device but you'd like the WOOHOO functionality implementing in Aarlo. What I need is the sequence of packets and their replies when you press the button. The only real way to do this is to press the button and see what new packets appear in the Name tab.

You will then need to copy and paste them into a bug report on GitHub. See the previous section on how to hide sensitive data.

FAQ

Can't I just share an account with the App

No. They spend all their timing arguing about who has control. This is an Arlo limitation.

My device doesn't appear...

Are you sure you've shared the device? Log in to the Arlo Web Page and make sure it appears there. If it does then turn on debug logs and raise a bug report with them.

I'm not getting status updates...

Make sure you have given the account you share the devices with Admin Access, it is needed for things like battery or signal strength updates.

I'm not seeing my base stations

Make sure you have given the account you share the devices with Admin Access, it is needed to share the base stations.

Are you using the new Arlo location based interface, in this case you can only arm or disarm locations and not individual devices.

Do I need a subscription

No subscription is needed to see the feeds, but you will need one to see recording.

At the time of writing (May 2024), there is no option to read local recordings. All others features works well.

Streams take a Long Time

They sure do. Arlo doesn't work like IP cameras and only records when motion is detected so asking it to start a stream involves talking to the Arlo servers that talk to the camera at your house... it can take a few seconds to get things running. Streaming works something like this:

Camera ---> Arlo Cloud Servers --> Home Assistant --> Your Home Assistant Client

The video traffic has to travel out of your house and then back into it...

Supported Devices

This is a list of devices that are known to work. Most Arlo devices will work even if not explicitly mentioned in this list although they might have limited functionality.

Known Limitations

This component was written by reverse engineering the APIs used on the Arlo Camera web page.

These are general limitations:

• There is no Documentation; I, and others, have had to reverse engineer the protocol, and for the most part this is easy enough once I get the packets...
• but I don't have access to all the equipment; so I rely on users to provide the device information and packets for me. The Reverse Engineering section gives you instructions on how to get these packets. Or, if you are feeling brave, you can temporarily share the device with me.
• and Arlo likes to Change Things; this all becomes more problematic when Arlo decides to change how things work, one minute things work and the next minute things break, unfortunately it has to break before I can fix it.

These are limitations verses the website:

• Cloud Flare; Aarlo has to bypass the 'not-a-robot' checks of Cloud Flare to login, this works most of the time but Arlo will change their back-end occasionally and break it. There are settings in the advanced configuration you can change to help with this. And yes, this can be a pain to get working.

These are limitations versus the mobile application:

• Object Detection; the mobile application will let you know almost immediately what triggered the motion event, this is not possible with the website APIs.
• Timeouts; the website doesn't feel like it was designed for persistent connections so Aarlo has a lot of code inside to try to mitigate this. But occasionally you might miss an event. There are settings in the advanced configuration you can change to help with this.

The last two can be summed up as if the WEB API doesn't support it, neither can the component. Bear that in mine when asking for new feature requests.