EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

Domoticz changes break remote access to HGI-80

I was on a November 2022 Domoticz beta and decided to update. It killed remote access to the HGI-80 (as expected) because now some kind of basic-auth needs to be included to access the /json.htm endpoints for the API. However, to my surprise the info in the Domoticz docs and forum-posts was too unclear for me to resolve so I went back to my old Domoticz backup and all is well again.

Does anybody on a recent Domoticz beta know what to change in the proxy to get this working correctly? I tried changing my proxy to include userass@ in the url but that didn't work.

[philchillbill]

v1.6 is Certified and Live



Amazon has certified v1.6 of EvoControl and it's now live. As always, you automatically use the newest version so no action is required to update anything.

• Thanks to an edited skill-manifest, all Echo Show screens will now correctly report their size and orientation to EvoControl. The setting to use larger tiles on small screens should thus work as intended. The black bars on the small 5" should be gone!
• You can now activate a scene permanently: e.g. 'Alexa, activate Standby permanently'. The beauty of this is that you can later override by voice or by local TRV-twisting. The standby activity has turned out to be very popular indeed, so thanks to Bruce for suggesting it. Incidentally, to revoke the permanence: 'Alexa, set all zones to Follow Schedule'.
• All the requests for voice-model tweaks made since October by this community have been implemented.
• I've extended the AMAZON.Room list manually with lots of zone names that Amazon didn't initially envisage as being a room name. This means that one-shots will work better with real-life zone names and e.g. with 'Outside' temperature.
• Even though Amazon released the Echo Show nearly 6 years ago, skill descriptions in the Amazon store could not include any screenshots and had to be 100% textual. Imagine how bad that was for games... That restriction was lifted only a few days ago and EvoControl is one of the very first skills to now have images on Amazon to showcase features! Anybody browsing the Alexa app or Amazon website for skills to control Evohome will now see the difference between the very basic Resideo skill and the far more capable EvoControl. Why it took Amazon so long is anybody's guess but glad it's here now.

I'll now go ahead and tweak the screens to actually make use of the correct reporting and roll that out soonest.

[jweaver]

I'll now go ahead and tweak the screens to actually make use of the correct reporting and roll that out soonest.

Loving the update already.. For the first time I can actually read the text on the Show 8. Looks a LOT nicer now and much easier to use.

Can i make a feature request (if its easy and possible).. When you add a new activity all of the zones are deactivated? Is there way to add a button to activate/deactivate them all? As my activies all use 12 zones, i have to select every zone each time.. Its hardly a big deal, but just thought it could be useful.

[bruce_miranda]

Loving the update already.. For the first time I can actually read the text on the Show 8. Looks a LOT nicer now and much easier to use.

Can i make a feature request (if its easy and possible).. When you add a new activity all of the zones are deactivated? Is there way to add a button to activate/deactivate them all? As my activies all use 12 zones, i have to select every zone each time.. Its hardly a big deal, but just thought it could be useful.

Infact I have a slight variant to this similar request. When starting a new Activity start the setpoint temperatures for all the zones at the current ones. It then gets easier to get to what you desire as opposed to starting them all at a fixed point. Again no big deal, but you are starting to make us feel greedy for features.

[philchillbill]

Infact I have a slight variant to this similar request. When starting a new Activity start the setpoint temperatures for all the zones at the current ones. It then gets easier to get to what you desire as opposed to starting them all at a fixed point. Again no big deal, but you are starting to make us feel greedy for features.

Er, they already do start at the current SPs. Once you tap the + to include a zone, you'll see that the SP it starts out with is the current SP. It's always been that way, even in the beta last year.

I'll add a select/deselect-all button because it's a good idea.

[Midland45]

I seem to have had a slight issue when scheduling a future standby activity, whilst already running in an activity. What seems to happen is my schedule that I’m running, (which is actually my B schedule at the moment) has new start/end switch points correctly added. The standby activity runs as expected, however on completion the start/end points were not removed. I think this has happened both times I’ve tried this. Attached are images from Wednesday 15/02/23

[philchillbill]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2022[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]2023[/ATTACH]

That's not a bug, it's the current design of the skill. The schedule is never edited unless you request it. That includes revokes to the baseline schedule after any voice-edits (scheduling an activity counts as a voice edit).

You have to revoke to the baseline (in this case 'B' schedule) before making other mods as otherwise the previous mods are indeed still there.

I could auto-revoke to baseline whenever a new activity is scheduled after some kind of previous edit, but that might lead to incorrect outcomes if things get out of step because multiple people in your house are using Evohome (whether in EvoControl, the TCC app, or via the panel). The skill would know what it had changed but any subsequent edits via the panel or app would be guesses at best. I think therefore it's safer to have the user revoke to whatever baseline is desirable before scheduling in another activity.

If anybody has better/other thoughts please share as this is quite an important topic.

[philchillbill]

The activity-editor now has 2 new buttons for All/None whenever a new scene is being created (not subsequently edited!).

[philchillbill]

Zone-to-Zone Schedule Cloning



EvoControl has a new feature to copy entire schedules between zones.

After tapping a tile on the main dashboard to view a zone's schedule, select the 'View' option. Select any of Live, A, B, C for the zone. Next, choose the 'More' option. Here you'll see (greyed-out for DHW, naturally) a 'Copy To' button. When you tap it, the screen shown above is launched. It's like the group-editor but with different colours so as not to confuse you. Tap on any zones that should receive the schedule in question and hit 'Finish'. Like with the Groups editor, tapping a selected zone deselects it again if you make a mistake. Hitting Cancel or the back button will also get you out of all this without making any changes. If you want to give it a whirl but don't actually want the clone in question, saying "Revert to Schedule A in the <Zone>" (assuming you were already on Schedule A in the target zone, that is ) will get you back.

It's shown in action in the video: https://vimeo.com/799401256

[Midland45]

That's not a bug, it's the current design of the skill. The schedule is never edited unless you request it. That includes revokes to the baseline schedule after any voice-edits (scheduling an activity counts as a voice edit).

You have to revoke to the baseline (in this case 'B' schedule) before making other mods as otherwise the previous mods are indeed still there.

I could auto-revoke to baseline whenever a new activity is scheduled after some kind of previous edit, but that might lead to incorrect outcomes if things get out of step because multiple people in your house are using Evohome (whether in EvoControl, the TCC app, or via the panel). The skill would know what it had changed but any subsequent edits via the panel or app would be guesses at best. I think therefore it's safer to have the user revoke to whatever baseline is desirable before scheduling in another activity.

If anybody has better/other thoughts please share as this is quite an important topic.

Oh right I see. Like you say it’s easily returned to the original schedule it was running. Sounds like it could get a bit messy trying to automatically achieve this on completion of a scheduled activity. I do think this may possibly catch a few people out though remembering to revoke to their original schedules perhaps on the following day.

[philchillbill]

Oh right I see. Like you say it’s easily returned to the original schedule it was running. Sounds like it could get a bit messy trying to automatically achieve this on completion of a scheduled activity. I do think this may possibly catch a few people out though remembering to revoke to their original schedules perhaps on the following day.

Agreed. I'll take a look at an auto-revoking option (it was on my list anyway). In the meanwhile, that's why the little schedule appendage under each tile is there. When it shows �� rather than ABC, you know you're not on baseline for that zone.

[Midland45]

Agreed. I'll take a look at an auto-revoking option (it was on my list anyway). In the meanwhile, that's why the little schedule appendage under each tile is there. When it shows �� rather than ABC, you know you're not on baseline for that zone.

Yes, I missed the ‘B’s had been replaced by the edit icon. Also why I didn’t see temporary overrides added on zones in Domoticz, during a previous scheduled standby session, as obviously it was being activated by schedule editing.

[philchillbill]

I was looking at why some people sometimes get one-off 401's from TCC which are resolved by just re-launching the skill and don't need a re-auth.

I think I was at times being a little too 'bursty' towards poor TCC . When you do something like upload a schedule or change a bunch of setpoints via an activity that involves many zones, I submit all the API calls in parallel instead of sequentially because that's nice and fast for the user experience. It almost always works, but if your token expires in the middle of the burst, some of the API calls were still being attempted with the stale token due to the out-of-order execution of requests inherent to nodejs.

To resolve this, I now pre-emptively look at how much life is left in your token before doing anything that involves bursts. If it's less than 3 mins I just go ahead and renew it before starting the burst at all. As tokens are valid for 30 mins, this should allow all bursts to complete regardless of the order of execution of the individual API commands.

I just pushed this live and will be watching the logs closely for the next days. Hopefully these sporadic 'TCC incomplete response' errors will now be a thing of the past...

[evoboff]

I've changed the code to just use the name. If you're already using the skill, say "Update my Configuration" to pick up the changes. Any new users will get the change automatically.

EDIT: if both systems are at the same address, would it be useful to display all zones from both systems simultaneously? If zone names are unique then this should be doable.

[philchillbill]

Did you get a chance to look at displaying all zone’s together irrespective of location?

Yes. Now that Amazon is correctly reporting screen size for all the various Echo & Alexa App combinations, I need to first get all the screens looking good with a boatload of tiles because with multiple locations displayed simultaneously, it will be important. When that's done, I already have the underlying engine pretty much ready for this. Watch this space.