Logic question: Automation: Arm / Disarm security camera

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Dear beloved community :wink:

I have a (hopefully) interesting question that I struggle with. I have a Blink security camera on the terrace which I can arm and disarm from HA. At the moment the only routine is that it’ll be armed as soon as we’re both away, and disarmed as soon as we’re back.
Now I want to arm it also at night, when we’re at home. Just doing a time controlled routine is easy, but I thought about having it more advanced to avoid:

  • alarms, whenwe’re one the terrace in summer enjoying a warm evening, staying up later then the time of the routine
  • disarming too early in the morning when it’s still dark outside and we’re sleeping longer (at the weekends for example)

All in all I would have it armed as long as possible without false alarms. Any idea how to do a logic here?
I don’t have movement sensors in the house, just all light switchs are integrated, so maybe I’d do something with them?

Thanks for your input,
stay healthy,
curzon

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I use some blink cameras at home in a similar fashion.

I have two internal cameras on one hub, and one external in the garden sat on its own hub.
We arm the garden camera only at night, and both sets of cameras when out.

I use the following triggers in various combinations to determine which (if any) blink cameras are armed / disarmed:

  • The house alarm is armed (via Konnected interface)
  • Someone / no-one is home (device tracker)
  • Everyone is asleep / someone is awake **

**Occupants are set as asleep / awake based on phones set to charge at night, with an API call from Tasker that sets a per person input_boolean (although I should really change that to use the companion app’s charging sensor - something I should look into this weekend I guess).

I guess the question is what other sensors you have - do you have the ability to determine that everyone is in the house for the night?

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I’m thinking this could be avoided if the time condition also has a condition that lights should be off in the house.
Or that it’s the lights that is the trigger for the camera.
Even if you sit outside in the summer, some lights us probably on inside that you can use as a trigger or condition?

The other problem can also be solved with one or more lights.

We have that setup here, but with our alarm.
As soon as we switch off all lights downstairs after 21:00 the alarm is armed.

Then it disarms at a time in the morning, but we could probably use lights as the trigger for that too if we wanted too.