topic Re: How to disarm Arlo Q from Wink while adjusting lighting using Wink schedule in Arlo Q

How to disarm Arlo Q from Wink while adjusting lighting using Wink schedule

bill77i8 — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 09:03:13 GMT

While I am away on vacation I use Wink schedules to manipulate various lights in my house to give the appearance that someone is home and I also leave my Arlo Q armed while away and set to detect motion. The problem is that when my Arlo Q is armed, sometimes the lighting changes cause the Arlo Q motion sensor to trigger. I have tried turning down the Arlo Q motion sensor sensitivity from "5" to "3" but even at "3" I still get nuisance alarms about 25% of the time. I would like to be able to simply change the Arlo Q mode to disarmed while lighting is being changed. I could do this with Arlo's scheduled mode except that mode only allows one block of armed time per day so it doesn't give me enough control to disarm Arlo during the 3 lighting transitions I have scheduled each day. I could also do this with a set of Wink Robots except that there is no action available in Wink to change Arlo modes. Oddly enough there is an arm/disarm action in Arlo's IFTTT channel but not in the Wink Hub. I could also try to orchestrate all this thru IFTTT but IFTTT has really coarse grained scheduling as date/time events can only be set on 15min intervals so I'd have to disarm my Arlo for 15 minutes just to change lighting programs. I am using a V1 Wink Hub. Only other way I thought of doing this was to plug the Arlo Q into a smart plug and use Wink schedules to control the smart plug - however this seems like a waste having to resort to a smart plug to control another smart device which already has Wink integration. Any other suggestions?

Re: How to disarm Arlo Q from Wink while adjusting lighting using Wink schedule

TomMac — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 14:30:19 GMT

I could do this with Arlo's scheduled mode except that mode only allows one block of armed time per day so it doesn't give me enough control to disarm Arlo during the 3 lighting transitions I have scheduled each day

You lost me a bit with above.... You could easily schedule the active MODE to 3 time slots in a day ... leaving a say 1-3 min window when the cameras are disarmed during the light changes.

Pic below shows 3 scheduled time slots in same day with a 2min break when cams are not armed

Cams are disarmed at 758am till 8am and at 5pm till 502 pm

Re: How to disarm Arlo Q from Wink while adjusting lighting using Wink schedule

bill77i8 — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 19:12:04 GMT

Thanks for replying TomMac - you are correct - I just tried this again and I was able to get my schedule updated with multiple gaps so my problem is solved. I was running into some flakiness when adding new schedule periods when I first tried this IE: "save" was not saving and it appeared as if I could only have one scheduled period per day - then I read something about a limitation like this on another thread. Anyway my schedule is working and allows me to disarm the camera while lighting is being transitioned 3 times per day. I haven't been able to pin down the exact scenarios when new schedule periods were not being saved - if I can come up with a clear repro scenario I'll post a new message about it. Thanks!