Since Home Assistant 2026.10, arming or disarming a Blink system from Home Assistant has worked, but the alarm panel entity kept showing the old state for up to five minutes. A fix by Sean Cardus, reviewed by frenck, was merged into the development branch on 24 October 2026. The pull request doesn't say which release will carry it.
Where the delay came from
The bug report, filed against 2026.10, describes it well: the Blink sync module really armed within seconds, yet the alarm_control_panel entity only caught up at the next scheduled poll. In 2026.9 the new state appeared at once.
The cause was a change merged on 19 September that stopped forcing a full Blink refresh on every poll. That made sense for scheduled polls, which had been re-downloading cached clips every 300 seconds. But Home Assistant also sets the BlinkPy library's refresh rate to the scan interval, 300 seconds by default, and BlinkPy quietly skips a refresh that comes too soon after the last one. So the refresh that followed an arm or disarm command did nothing, and the entity waited for the next poll.
The camera motion detection switch had the same problem.
What changed
The fix no longer relies on that refresh:
- After an arm or disarm, the alarm panel reads the sync module's network information straight away.
- After a successful motion detection command, the switch updates the camera's motion setting in Home Assistant right away, as the camera entity already did. If the command didn't actually take, the next poll corrects it.
The author tested it on a 2026.10.2 install with one sync module, sending each command within 30 seconds of the last fetch, when the old code would have skipped the refresh:
| Command | Time since last fetch | State updated |
|---|---|---|
| Arm | 3 s | 0.2 s later |
| Disarm | 19 s | 0.3 s later |
| Motion switch on | 3 s | 0.3 s later |
Before the fix, arming 18 seconds after a fetch took 5 minutes and 1 second to show up. The pull request also adds the first tests for the Blink alarm panel and switch.
Why the lag mattered
A five-minute delay isn't only cosmetic. An automation that arms Blink when everyone leaves and then checks the alarm state, or a dashboard someone glances at on the way out, saw "disarmed" for minutes after the system was armed. Anything waiting for a state change could fire late or not at all.
A companion pull request from the same author, which brings BlinkPy's refresh rate back to its 30-second default, was still open at the time of writing. It makes the skipped refresh rarer, but the merged fix works without it.