EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[bruce_miranda]

My PRs were being implemented very quickly but each time I looked at the code to make any changes, my head hurt. Now since David has created ramses_cc for HA, it has left Domoticz far far behind in terms of message parsing etc.

[philchillbill]

Easy ngrok setup for Domoticz



The easy setup procedure for ngrok/Domoticz mentioned a few posts back is now live in your EvoControl dashboard. The help is at https://smartskills.tech/ec/help/easyngrok.html

The main advantage is that it not only downloads ngrok and sets it up to auto-run on boot, it includes a script that polls ngrok at restart for the assigned URL and pushes the new url to EvoControl's back-end. That way, the skill always has the correct connectivity details for Domoticz and ngrok becomes set-and-forget even on the free plan.

[philchillbill]

The schedule-comparison graphs that plot the Live/ABC schedule data either per day or for a whole week will now correctly plot data for DHW with On/Off on the y-axis instead of degrees.

[bruce_miranda]

This reminds me of the grief I had when trying to change the HW setpoint on the Domoticz. Someone in their wisdom hardcoded it to 60C, probably because at that time the RF message to update the HW setpoint wasn't known. This single change on Domoticz aged me.

[philchillbill]

[Midland45]

Just noticed today I can’t display a graph of my zones 1 and 2. The tiles indicate they’ve been selected, however a graph isn’t displayed, and the screen simply stays on the Home Screen. Zones 3 to 10 are all working ok on my Echo Show 8. All the zones are plotting ok in Domoticz fine. All other features are working ok in all the zones, so not sure what the issue is?

[philchillbill]

Just noticed today I can’t display a graph of my zones 1 and 2. The tiles indicate they’ve been selected, however a graph isn’t displayed, and the screen simply stays on the Home Screen. Zones 3 to 10 are all working ok on my Echo Show 8. All the zones are plotting ok in Domoticz fine. All other features are working ok in all the zones, so not sure what the issue is?

Is that still happening or was it a one-off?

[Midland45]

Yeh, its still failing to graph zone 1 and 2

[philchillbill]

Yeh, its still failing to graph zone 1 and 2

Looks like a bug due to the week-restart rollover from Sunday to Monday happening in the past 24h in combination with the last scheduled switchpoint on Sunday for those zones. I need to do some modulo arithmetic that I didn't realise. Leave it with me.

[philchillbill]

Ok, the graphing function now correctly handles the wraparound for a 24h period that starts on Sunday and includes part of Monday. While I was at it, I decided to plot all available data with shifted x-axis markings, rather than starting the plot at the first hour mark before the data-start with blank data up to the moment of the data-start. In other words, the first horizontal tickmark is not exactly on the hour as it used to be. This, however, uncovered a small bug in Amazon's charting-library which fails to display the final x-axis tickmark (time-value). That was always the case but less noticeable with a start at n instead of n+1. Not the end of the world and hopefully Amazon will fix it sometime.

If anything looks odd please let me know

[Midland45]

Yeh that’s all working spot on, thanks again for your efforts.

[philchillbill]

Outside Temperature Display / Graphing



EvoControl now supports outside temperature display on the main dashboard and also graphing the trend for the previous 24h. When using a HGI-80, your Domoticz 'EvoControl' roomplan should contain a device either called 'Outside' or with 'alias: outside' in the Description field. Any device with the correct name according to this scheme will be discovered provided it reports a Type of 'Temp' (regardless of its HardwareTypeVal). This means you can use a real sensor outside your property if you have one, or a virtual sensor via an online service that provides weather for your location (I use BuienRadar for this in the Netherlands and it works great).

The main dashboard will display the outside temperature in the header when available:



The little road/tree emoji next to the temperature value looks different in the APL simulator used to create this screenshot vs my actual Echo devices (where it shows as a national park with trees and a mountain ). One way or another, clearly outdoorsy!

If the emoji looks weird on anybody's Echo screen please let me know as I have no idea what some platforms will dish up when asked for 🏞.

To display the graph, you must use a voice command as the header on APL screens is unfortunately not touch-enabled.

The command is 'Show the Outdoor graph'. You can use any of ['Outside', 'Outdoor', 'Outdoors', 'Exterior', 'External', 'Open air'] as preferred.

[philchillbill]

I see in the logs some people had trouble adding their Outside sensor. I've relaxed the filter that reported 'spurious' devices not supposed to be in the RoomPlan so it should now work ok if you retry.

One thing: the skill categorizes zones as being of type AMAZON.Room and Amazon fails to recognise 'Outside' as a room name (understandably). I get around this by adding 'Outside' to the list of known-ok phrases, but EvoControl can only do that when launched first and then subsequently commanded. This means that the first time you successfully add the Outside sensor and refresh your Account, you'll have to exit the skill and re-enter it before the new sensor will work. Only the first time though.

[RedEarth]

If the emoji looks weird on anybody's Echo screen please let me know as I have no idea what some platforms will dish up when asked for 🏞.

Emojipedia is a good source to check how emoji look on various different platforms...

https://emojipedia.org/national-park/

[philchillbill]

Emojipedia is a good source to check how emoji look on various different platforms...

https://emojipedia.org/national-park/