EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[Midland45]

So I've gone through the Re-Auth procedure from the EvoControl Dashboard and still can't get Smart heat to run on any of my Echo devices. Everything is ticked green when viewed on chrome webpage (its black on safari via an ipad). Didn't really want to unlink and re-link via the dashboard as don't want to lose Activities I have set up. So not sure what to attempt next to sort this out.

[philchillbill]

Try it now - should be ok. It wasn't just you and it wasn't your dashboard either. I corrected a small bug yesterday and something went wrong in uploading the corrected file to the AWS Lambda. This essentially took the skill offline for everybody

Apologies but where I am for the XMAS hols does not have the best internet.

[Midland45]

Great stuff. Its all back up and running I was really missing the ease of using the activities I've set up within smart heat to focus heating to where we are in the house.
Thanks again and Happy New Year to everyone.

[Stevedh]

Fixed for me too, noticed it wasn't working last night, just now found time to come on and remind myself what I was meant to do, read the above comment, tested it again.. and its now working.
thanks

[philchillbill]

Good to hear. Sorry again for the mishap. From now on, I'll make sure to test that the skill loads OK whenever I make updates from places other than my office...

I never actually looked at the dashboard-related screens on a Mac or iPad but all the emoticons used are just unicode emojis and every browser renders them differently. See https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html for examples of how that looks. The tickmark symbol ✔ is green on Windows but indeed black or grey on other platforms. So the information is contained in the shape rather than the colour. In general, Apple does a far more detailed rendering of emojis than the other platforms could be bothered to do. It's good that you triggered me to look though because I just checked on a Mac and also noticed some aspect ratios on the forms being narrower than I am used to (Mac screens are 16:10 instead of 16:9) which causes unnecessary wrapping.I'll take a look at that and tweak to improve the dashboard UI on a Mac/iPad.

Many happy returns for a fantastic 2023 for everyone! 🍾

[philchillbill]

Just thinking about what Midland45 said about potentially losing activities/groups if he had needed to re-link. I could pretty easily add a 'send backup' button to the settings screen that would email a JSON file with your activities and groups to your stored TCC account email address for you to keep safely. If you ever needed to restore it then you could forward that email to me and I could paste it into the DB (letting you do that yourself would be too much of a security risk).

Idea?

[Midland45]

Just thinking about what Midland45 said about potentially losing activities/groups if he had needed to re-link. I could pretty easily add a 'send backup' button to the settings screen that would email a JSON file with your activities and groups to your stored TCC account email address for you to keep safely. If you ever needed to restore it then you could forward that email to me and I could paste it into the DB (letting you do that yourself would be too much of a security risk).

Idea?

That’s a great idea, I do like the sound of a back up for activities/groups :-)

[Midland45]

Another reason I would like the above back up suggested is due to a minor issue I had setting up activities on an Echo Show 8, caused by having more than 8 zones, ie more than 2 rows displayed. I have 10 zones, so a third row is used for zone 9 and zone 10
What I find is that to adjust activity temp set points on Zones 9 and 10 which are displayed in row 3, after each 0.5 deg adjustment the screen resets to displaying Zones 1 to 8. So its necessary each time to use the down arrow to access Zone 9 and 10 again to then allow another 0.5 deg increment to be made. I have 9 activities set up so would be a bit of a pain to go through this again.
Just wondered if it would be possible to change the screens behaviour when editing activities so that it didn’t reset after each change to row 3 zones to displaying the rows 1 and 2.

[philchillbill]

Wow, 9 activities is a record — congrats! I have the email/backup idea already working in my test environment so will push it live mid-week after some more testing.

Good point you raise about editing scenes when > 8 tiles. I'm not sure that if I send just the updated data and not the whole screen then the Echo will repaint it all anyway or just hold the scroll as-is. I don't have access to an Echo where I am now, only the Amazon online simulator for APL. But will have a play with it later this week as it's definitely not my intention for it to keep re-scrolling. As an alternative if it does not work to hold the scroll, I could have a setting to always show all zones on screen by shrinking them vertically. Thing is if somebody has the full 12 zones and also DHW, the tiles would become really 'flat'. So need to experiment to find a good compromise.

[philchillbill]

The activities/groups backup is now live. Under the settings cog on the main skill-dashboard you'll see a Backup button with an envelope/document icon. It's enabled whenever you have any scenes or groups defined. Pressing it will send an email to your TCC recovery email address. If you ever inadvertently delete data or unlink/re-link the skill you can forward that email to me to paste the JSON back into the db for you.

[Midland45]

The activities/groups backup is now live. Under the settings cog on the main skill-dashboard you'll see a Backup button with an envelope/document icon. It's enabled whenever you have any scenes or groups defined. Pressing it will send an email to your TCC recovery email address. If you ever inadvertently delete data or unlink/re-link the skill you can forward that email to me to paste the JSON back into the db for you.

[Midland45]

I also currently have an issue with my HG180/Domoticz integration in that I’m not receiving the additional HG180 data and get unknown url warning message. This had been working brilliantly, however after a ngrok url change, and even after updating both Domoticz and Evocontrol Dashboard I’ve still got an issue. I’ve toggled the HG180 button to on via the smart heat display but just get the url unknown message after a few minutes. My Domoticz dashboard is fully ticked and detects the “HG180” ok, so not to sure what’s wrong. I can access Domoticz ok remotely using the ngrok url address, so not quite sure what is causing the issue at the moment?
Appreciate you are on holiday, so no need to rush to check anything at your end.

[philchillbill]

Thats really good, great to know there’s a back up for this. I’ve just actually tried this via the new back up icon and got the confirmation message of back up sent, however I haven’t actually received an email with an attached file. I’ve checked in junk/spam etc and tried sending a second time but nothing has arrived yet.

Do you have an over-active antivirus that does not like embedded JSON in emails? Just tested it here and it worked fine so it's not the code. Also, re you sure you checked the spam folder of the correct email address? Many people use several emails for various things. Looks like yours was an icloud domain, correct? I can add the address that will be used to the on-screen message to prod people correctly on this.

[philchillbill]

I also currently have an issue with my HG180/Domoticz integration in that I’m not receiving the additional HG180 data and get unknown url warning message. This had been working brilliantly, however after a ngrok url change, and even after updating both Domoticz and Evocontrol Dashboard I’ve still got an issue. I’ve toggled the HG180 button to on via the smart heat display but just get the url unknown message after a few minutes. My Domoticz dashboard is fully ticked and detects the “HG180” ok, so not to sure what’s wrong. I can access Domoticz ok remotely using the ngrok url address, so not quite sure what is causing the issue at the moment?
Appreciate you are on holiday, so no need to rush to check anything at your end.

ngrok has started adding an interceptor which needs to be clicked away and the skill is not doing that (yet). I'll look into it:

Screenshot 2023-01-05 200940.jpg

If there's any way you can open 443 in your router and get a DNS name like joebloggs.no-ip.com it will be set-and-forget. ngrok is great for quick and dirty testing of stuff but not ideal for longer term.

EDIT: I've added the required header headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json", "ngrok-skip-browser-warning": "true" } to the ngrok request so it should work OK now.

[Midland45]

Do you have an over-active antivirus that does not like embedded JSON in emails? Just tested it here and it worked fine so it's not the code. Also, re you sure you checked the spam folder of the correct email address? Many people use several emails for various things. Looks like yours was an icloud domain, correct? I can add the address that will be used to the on-screen message to prod people correctly on this.

Yeh it is an icloud address, but there is no sign of the email in icloud's junk or junk email, which would be the usual culprit. So unless its Apple's icloud mail server itself blocking the email not sure whats going on. I do have gmail account so maybe will have to look at changing everything over to that email.