Eisenberg — Arlo for Home Assistant

A Home Assistant custom integration for Arlo cameras, named after skating legend Arlo Eisenberg. Built around event-driven MQTT (no polling) with a typed Pydantic API client.

📖 Long-form walk-through (UX, auth, MQTT, streaming): Eisenberg: Arlo cameras on Home Assistant, the easy way (🇮🇹 italiano).

What you get

• Live RTSPS streaming with sub-second lag (forced TCP, ffmpeg low-delay flags).
• Camera entity with snapshots, motion thumbnails and stream keyframes cached on disk so the tile survives restarts and stays populated while disarmed.
• Binary sensors — generic motion (from MQTT motionDetected) plus AI-classified person / vehicle / animal detections.
• Security mode select — armAway / armHome / standby via Arlo's v3 location automation API (with revision tracking).
• Siren switch.
• Battery / signal sensors.
• Base-station connectivity binary sensor.
• Snapshot service — eisenberg.snapshot for dashboard buttons or automations.
• Media archival — opt-in storage of motion clips, thumbnails and stream keyframes to a configured media_dirs location, with rolling retention (default 14 days).

Installation

HACS (recommended)

The fastest path: click the Open in HACS badge above. It opens your HA instance's HACS UI prepared to add this repo as a custom integration — review and confirm.

Manual HACS path:

1. HACS → Integrations → ⋮ → Custom repositories → add https://github.com/vjt/ha-eisenberg with category Integration.
2. Install Eisenberg (Arlo).
3. Restart Home Assistant.
4. Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → search "Eisenberg".

Manual

Copy custom_components/eisenberg/ into your HA custom_components/ directory, install the pyeisenberg Python package into the HA Python environment, and restart.

Configuration

The config flow asks for your Arlo email and password.

• If your browser is already trusted at Arlo, login is silent — no verification step needed.

• Otherwise, you pick how Arlo should verify this device. Push notification, email or SMS — whichever factors your account has enabled. Push is fastest; email/SMS is the fallback if the Arlo Secure app on your phone hasn't been opened recently.

  

• Push factor: approve the notification on your phone, then click Submit. Email/SMS factor: type the one-time code Arlo just sent you. Each click is a single API call — no polling — so rate-limit risk stays low.

After login you pick a media storage location (or Disabled to skip archival).

Already configured? Settings → Devices & Services → Eisenberg → ⋮ → Reconfigure re-runs the verification step (useful if your trust cookie expired, or you want to switch factor).

Options

• Storage Location — change the archive directory.
• Detection sensor reset timeout — how long person/vehicle/animal binary sensors stay on after a detection (default 30 s).
• Archived media retention — days to keep on disk (default 14).

Services

eisenberg.snapshot

Request a fresh full-frame snapshot from a camera. The image arrives asynchronously via MQTT and refreshes the camera tile. Fails with a clear error if the camera is in standby (Arlo refuses cloud snapshots while disarmed).

service: eisenberg.snapshot
target:
  entity_id: camera.front_door

Events

The integration fires eisenberg_media events on motion detection with device_id, category, categories, content_url, thumbnail_url, duration, timestamp. Use these in automations to log clips elsewhere or trigger downstream actions.

Architecture

• eisenberg/ — pure async Arlo client. REST + raw MQTT 3.1.1 over WebSocket. Pydantic models for every payload.
• custom_components/eisenberg/ — the HA integration. A single coordinator owns the client + MQTT stream and pushes state to entities via _handle_coordinator_update.

Why another Arlo integration?

The existing reference is pyaarlo and the HA integration that wraps it. It works, it's been kept alive heroically, and we owe it the protocol reverse-engineering this client stands on. But it carries years of accreted workarounds for problems Arlo has since stopped having:

• No Cloudflare bypass. pyaarlo ships cloudscraper because the old Arlo endpoints were behind a JS challenge. The current ocapi-app.arlo.com / myapi.arlo.com endpoints accept plain aiohttp with normal browser headers — the same flow my.arlo.com uses.
• No User-Agent spoofing tricks. We use a vanilla Chrome UA for REST and a mobile UA only where Arlo gates RTSP on it (the startStream endpoint returns DASH for browsers, RTSP for the mobile app). Two distinct paths, both documented.
• No 2FA email polling, no IMAP scraping. Auth is driven by the same browser-trust cookie flow Arlo's own web app uses: one push to your phone, one click in HA, then a 14-day trusted-browser cookie. No polling, no inbox access, no rate-limit risk from background retries.
• No sync-over-thread-pool fake async. The whole client is native aiohttp + asyncio. MQTT 3.1.1 is implemented from scratch over the existing aiohttp WebSocket session — no paho-mqtt, no second TCP stack to keep alive.
• Typed at the boundary. Every Arlo API/MQTT payload lands in a Pydantic model. Unknown shapes log loudly instead of silently succeeding — that's how new MQTT topics surfaced during development.

This is a smaller surface (single hardware family, web-auth flow only), not a drop-in pyaarlo replacement. If you need basestation hubs, locally-stored video, IMAP 2FA fallback, or any of pyaarlo's broader device matrix — stay there. If you have a recent battery/solar Arlo and want a small, typed, event-driven integration you can read end to end, this is for you.

Camera support

Tested against the Arlo Essential XL HD (VMC2052A) (battery + solar, WiFi, cloud-only). Other Arlo models that share the same v3 automation

• MQTT shapes should work — file an issue if yours doesn't.

Limitations

• All control flows through Arlo's cloud — there's no local API on these cameras.
• The trust cookie Arlo issues lasts about 14 days. When it expires, HA fires a reauth; one click re-fires a push.

Development

./scripts/check.sh    # pyright + pytest + ruff

The deploy skill (/eisenberg-deploy) pushes to a HAOS box over SSH. The release skill (/eisenberg-release) cuts PyPI + GitHub releases.

License

MIT.