EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

I decided to order an Echo anyway and give it a go, the skill does alot that I like. I am thinking that I can set everything up on the echo and use it visually as I have three Sonos in the same room and saying Alexa would trigger the Sonos and Echo lol.
Mark

[philchillbill]

[bruce_miranda]

While I too feel that maybe HW should be treated differently, the scrolling and odd tiles are bound to hit some people. And Phil has quite a task to make all screen sizes usable. This is where the zone ordering helps to bring the main zones into view, a technique all of us use on the main controller. What luck the zone order between the app and the controller can be set differently. Maybe one feature Phil might consider for the future is a Simple/Detailed tile view and then maybe squashing is possible.

[jweaver]

While I too feel that maybe HW should be treated differently, the scrolling and odd tiles are bound to hit some people.

Thats exactly why my first suggestion was the ability to simply disable hot water.

This would give someone like me an option to go back to an Even number of tiles.. and would allow someone who already had an odd number of zones to show HW and get an even number.

But Phil wants to implement this properly by allowing us to hide zones at will.. I guess we all have zones we dont really care about and would be happy to hide them to get a better looking Ui.

I do like the your idea for a "detailed" view.. Perhaps a button to show “all”. So you could have your customized view showing the zones you want to see, nice and big/clear.. and then another view showing ALL zones when you need it.

It will be interesting to see what Phil comes up with.

[philchillbill]

Hiding Selected Tiles for better legibility



The Alias editor reached from the Settings page now features green radio buttons beside zone names to allow toggling tiles on/off for display on the main dashboard. Note that even when hidden on the dashboard, they remain controllable/queryable by voice and also continue to show in the Activity Editor and Setpoint Editor.

When any tiles are hidden, a new Mask-icon button appears on the main dashboard to allow you to toggle between hiding/unhiding for an entire session or until reset.

It's all demonstrated in the video at https://vimeo.com/801269500

[jweaver]

The Alias editor reached from the Settings page now features green radio buttons beside zone names to allow toggling tiles on/off for display on the main dashboard. Note that even when hidden on the dashboard, they remain controllable/queryable by voice and also continue to show in the Activity Editor and Setpoint Editor.

When any tiles are hidden, a new Mask-icon button appears on the main dashboard to allow you to toggle between hiding/unhiding for an entire session or until reset.

It's all demonstrated in the video at https://vimeo.com/801269500

Bravo.. That is awesome... Thats really going to help me and I am sure others too.

I need to ask a question as I am fascinated by accents... I assumed you were Dutch and thought I got that from your accent in the last video.. But are you actually Irish?

[philchillbill]

Bravo.. That is awesome... Thats really going to help me and I am sure others too.

I need to ask a question as I am fascinated by accents... I assumed you were Dutch and thought I got that from your accent in the last video.. But are you actually Irish?

Yes, I'm Irish but present as Dutch as I've been in NL since 1985. I guess the brogue is hard to shake off.

[jweaver]

Yes, I'm Irish but present as Dutch as I've been in NL since 1985. I guess the brogue is hard to shake off.

In the first video you went me a few weeks back, I would have sworn you were Dutch.. But in this video you were full on Irish.

I love how peoples accents change.. I am from Bristol so have a West Country accent, but moved to Wales 20 years ago and I slip in and out of Bristolian all the time..

[bruce_miranda]

Phil, do you ever think you might be able to expose some of the skill functions to an Alexa Routine?
Edit : Ignore me, I just realised that can already use many of the skill features via the Customised Routine option by just typing in the skill command.
And now with Standby being my favourite feature of this skill, I've just added the Standby action to my Alexa routines. Alexa, I'm going out.

[philchillbill]

Phil, do you ever think you might be able to expose some of the skill functions to an Alexa Routine?
Edit : Ignore me, I just realised that can already use many of the skill features via the Customised Routine option by just typing in the skill command.
And now with Standby being my favourite feature of this skill, I've just added the Standby action to my Alexa routines. Alexa, I'm going out.

[philchillbill]

I was playing with Alexa routines and decided to try and use an occupancy detection routine to get EvoControl to override a room based on occupancy. It's described at https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custo...DDK2AGHRZS6N5X.

Unfortunately, because my Amazon account is with the .nl store, I don't have access to the occupancy detection inside Alexa (using camera/mic for people detection), I'm guessing for privacy reasons. Has anybody in the UK tried this?

I can use Smart Home triggers like door/window sensors, timers, and sound detection to trigger an activity, but the occupancy option is not even shown in my Alexa app

[philchillbill]

All the visuals are now tweaked to be pixel-perfect on all 12 variations of Echo Show, Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices. This is probably as good as it's gonna get visually

[philchillbill]

Somebody in the UK linked the skill today and upon the initial TCC query managed to generate a 400 error with { code: 'ScheduleNotFound', message: 'Schedule not found.' }.

I've not seen this one before so just threw a generic error. I wonder if it means this person simply never defined a schedule, or TCC had a glitch and wouldn't return a schedule at this juncture but might later. Anybody seen it before while playing with the API?

[bruce_miranda]

My guess, the person has never used the app before and set up TCC for your skill. Your skill queried TCC before the controller has synced with TCC. Because on the controller, you cannot have a zone without a schedule.
It's either that or a TCC glitch.

[philchillbill]

My guess, the person has never used the app before and set up TCC for your skill. Your skill queried TCC before the controller has synced with TCC. Because on the controller, you cannot have a zone without a schedule.
It's either that or a TCC glitch.

Could indeed be that. Anyway, I've now made sure that the error does not cause a skill-exit but merely returns an empty object. A config refresh would pick up the schedule later if it was just a TCC glitch.

While I was at it, I've implemented a retry when TCC just ignores a request. It does that sometimes with no explanation and just hangs the https socket. You can see this happening in your mobile app too from time to time, where you will try a manual override and it will just ignore it. I used to immediately throw an error and if you re-launched the skill all would be fine again. Instead, I now wait 3 seconds and automatically retry for you in the hope that TCC will be in a better mood on the second attempt You only get the throw if the 2nd attempt fails also.