EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

Home Assistant connector ready for beta-testers

Thanks to some significant hand-holding by HA-gurus @zxdavb and @bruce_miranda, EvoControl now has a HA-Connector for anybody with a HGI-80 / SSM / nanoCUL USB device plus the ramses_cc integration.

It's basically a HA version of what was already possible via the Domoticz-connector.

The updated website for the skill at https://smartskills.tech/evocontrol describes the new features as follows:



Setting up the connectivity towards HA is pretty simple, and the tickbox shown in your account dashboard when you login at https://smartskills.tech/ec/register now shows both Domoticz and HA as options. When ticked, the resulting modal/popup now includes 3 buttons instead of 2, adding Home Assistant adjacent to Domoticz. Selecting that option then links you to the following screen:



The form fields are pretty self-explanatory for anybody who has enabled remote access to their HA instance for e.g. the mobile app. When you press Verify then the provided details are checked to ensure that a HA instance properly responds (if not then the details are rejected). If approved, the next time you launch the skill and update your configuration from the settings page, EvoControl will discover your HA setup in detail. Note that it requires a 1:1 relationship between your entity ID names and your TCC zone names or you will be told to correct the mismatches. If you have a TCC zone called 'Living Room' then HA needs an entity_id called climate.living_room, etc.

For now I'm working with whitelisted users for a quick beta before I unleash it to the general public. If you're interested in trying it out, reply here or drop me a DM.

Again, many thanks to Bruce for patiently explaining the intricacies of HA and being the initial beta tester.

[philchillbill]

Several small improvements have been made around the handling of DHW:

• PermanentOverride is now supported
• You can now modify the duration of an existing TemporaryOverride. It used to be that if the On/Off state was the same as the previous override, the change was rejected on the basis of "No need, it's already..."
• The Bulk Schedule Editor now fully supports DHW.
• Users with a HGI may have noticed that the next-switchpoint appendage was absent until a first refresh from TCC. That's now corrected.
• The Setpoint Editor allows changes to DHW when system mode is HeatingOff.

Also, when the system mode is either Away or HeatingOff, any graphs you request will automatically have the Schedule-curve dimmed to highlight that it was not a factor in the SP you see.

[philchillbill]

Another new DHW tweak: 5 different types of fault as reported by the TCC API can now show up on the DHW tile in EvoControl.

[bruce_miranda]

Another new DHW tweak: 5 different types of fault as reported by the TCC API can now show up on the DHW tile in EvoControl.

I am still absolutely shocked that the TCC API has this information and yet the TCC app doesn't make any use of them. What an absolutely wasted opportunity. But thank you for continuing the good work.

[philchillbill]

Because fault conditions can be present on a tile that's off screen (because a peek/scroll is needed to see it), the presence of any fault in the system will now show a ⚠️ symbol in the header (adjacent to the outside temperature) until all faults have been cleared. Due to a bug in the Evotouch, it removes the full-screen popup announcing a fault as soon as any fault is corrected, meaning multiple faults are masked unless you look specifically in the fault-log. That's not necessary in EvoControl.

[philchillbill]

Another bonus for HA users with DHW:

Because of the concept of 'differential', DHW won't actually call for heat unless the current water temperature is below the setpoint by at least the value of the differential. Think of it as large hysteresis. Well, HA can determine when the DHW relay is actually on as opposed to just scheduled to be on, so that's now detected in EvoControl. When the relay is really on, the water symbol on the DHW tile is red but when it's off (because the hot water is already hot enough compared to the differential), the water icon is black.

Also for HA users: Battery data for all devices in a zone (e.g. multiple TRV's, wall-stats) is checked and the overall battery status is reported based on the best-case capability rather than least common denominator (which your Evotouch does). So if a percentage is reported by a device (e.g. HR 92) then that will be shown even if the other devices in a zone (e.g. HR 80) can only report a binary battery status low/ok.


EDIT: Now also done for Domoticz

[philchillbill]

Regarding the disappearing widgets, Amazon finally responded: "Sorry for the late reply. Our internal team found the issue and updated the code however the fix hasn't been delivered yet.
Short term workaround is to do factory reset on the device that has the issue. I am trying to get estimate day of the delivery." I'd say a little more patience is called for rather than resetting people's Echos...

[philchillbill]

• Enable 'Allow Basic-Auth authentication over plain HTTP (API only)' on your Domoticz UI's Setup → Settings → Security tab.
• Visit the Setup → Users tab and create a new Domoticz user with 'User' rights (and of course access to all your Evohome devices via the [Set Devices] button on the right).
• Assign the same username and password to this user as you use with your ngrok tunnel or with apache/nginx. That way, the basic-auth passes through in the http headers and satisfies both your proxy (ngrok) and Domoticz.

In this respect, HA is much better than Domoticz in that it can use Long Lived access Tokens instead of basic-auth. The Domoticz WiKi claims to support JWT tokens and IAM but there are no examples whatsoever of how to do it. In fact, it reads like drivel generated by AI rather than an already-implemented feature in Domoticz. I've posted a question on the Domoticz forums and if I ever get a satisfactory answer then I'll upgrade EvoControl to use this instead.

[Midland45]

Regarding the disappearing widgets, Amazon finally responded: "Sorry for the late reply. Our internal team found the issue and updated the code however the fix hasn't been delivered yet.
Short term workaround is to do factory reset on the device that has the issue. I am trying to get estimate day of the delivery." I'd say a little more patience is called for rather than resetting people's Echos...

[philchillbill]

Thanks for the update, least we know it’s on the way

Well, I just got the 'definitive' response from Amazon and it's breathtaking:

"I got the estimated time of delivery. This will be some time later this year. Could you ask your users to do factory reset until then if you get reported? Please also tell me if factory reset doesn't work."

[bruce_miranda]

Imagine the number of Echo Shows Amazon could have sold this Prime day in July :-)

What do you lose when you reset an Echo Show?

[philchillbill]

Imagine the number of Echo Shows Amazon could have sold this Prime day in July :-)

What do you lose when you reset an Echo Show?

I think you'll have to redo your WiFi setup. You may also mess up any photos set up as homescreen. And of course Amazon will grab the opportunity to turn back on all the ultra-helpful homescreen crap you of course opted out of.

I'm amazed that I can fix a bug in 5 mins sometimes, test in another 5 and upload the live fix. They will take months to ship a resolution to this issue. Small is nimble as they say! Incidentally, while testing a second widget I'm working on I've discovered a few more bugs at their end so I'm putting the 2nd widget on hold, unfortunately...

[philchillbill]

Domoticz connector now requires latest Domoticz build

The Domoticz devs have decided to implement numerous changes to the API command syntax, as of 1-June-2023 (build 15326). I've decided to no longer support older versions of Domoticz in the skill's connector, so if you're on an ancient version of Domoticz you may discover the skill keeps disabling connectivity to your HGI-80 (or clone) and falls back on TCC for everything. The current stable build is from February 2023 so that means you need to switch to the beta channel to use the connector. Hey, this forum is for nerds, after all!

If you update to the latest Domoticz Beta then make sure to enable the "Allow Basic-Auth authentication over plain HTTP (API only)" toggle in the Domoticz security settings in the UI and also add a Domoticz user with the same credentials as your proxy uses. Takes less than a minute and then you're all set.

[philchillbill]

A few tweaks:

• The back-button functionality on all screens has now been improved for nested screens to do what a back-button should actually do — go back one level (sometimes it went back to the top level).
• The Graph button on the main dashboard (when you have a HGI) is now cancellable by tapping it again.
• I've removed the whitelisting requirement for the HA Connector so anybody can now set it up at will.

[Midland45]

I'm in the process of switching (defecting) from Domoticz to Home Assistant (HA) I actually just installed it a couple of days ago. Although its early days, everything seems to be running fine with HA.
Next step was to link Evocontrol to my HGI-80 via HA, however I discovered I now have an issue that Evocontrol fails to load with an error "Although your TCC setup has no declared Hot Water capability, your Home Assistant schema nevertheless reflects it. Pleases address and re-try."

As my boiler is a combination type and Evohome is therefore CH only, I'm presuming this must be an issue within my HA set up, however I thought Evocontrol would still load but simply block my HGI-80 link. I'll have do some research with HA and my HA config when I have some more time, to eliminate any issues.