EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

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.

I was being over-zealous with checking the HA config I've now tweaked things so it should no longer produce that error (an empty object was still being seen as 'present', my bad). Please give it a try again.

Previously, I did have things structured so that a HGI-error would automatically disable the Enable/Use HGI-80 option which then allows the skill to load with just TCC on the next run after an error. However, that makes debugging (for the user, not me) more tedious as after every tweak to your HA setup you then have to re-enable, exit the skill, and re-enter. So now it just stays enabled and on the next launch of the skill will retry your HGI to see what you changed to fix things. If that locks you out of the skill what you can do is delete the HGI association on your account dashboard and then the skill will load via TCC.

I'll take a look at improving this so the HGI config-error message will sound but still allow the skill to continue to the dashboard via TCC.



EDIT: Done

[Midland45]

Thanks for looking at this, slightly quicker than Amazon
Right so have successfully re-linked to my HGI-80 and can launch EvoControl OK. Everything is ticked ok on my dashboard and on launching the EvoControl skill can now see the HA symbol in red.
I get the verbal warning "Home Assistant did not respond in a timely manner......." So not sure why this isn't able to harvest data
Also noticed if I toggled the "HGI-80 Enable" in settings to off then back on I get verbal warning "connecting to Domoticz failed", so not sure if there's still some other issues.

[bruce_miranda]

Are you sure your HA is accessible from the Internet with a valid https domain url and SSL certificate? And then that you have generated a Long Lived Token for HA and put that into the EvoControl HA registration page. Maybe start again and mark your EvoControl as not using either HA or Domoticz first. Then add HA, rather than trying to switch between Domoticz to HA.

[Midland45]

Thanks for your reply.
Yeh HA is accessible externally, I checked this using my iphones 4G connection (wifi off), and both the HA mobile app or using my url in a browser links successfully to HA.
The Long Lived Token has been entered in the EvoControl Dashboard too.
As suggested I'll try deleting the HGI-80 link again and re-entering to see if that'll correct things.

Cheers for your help

[bruce_miranda]

Yeah the fact that it is still saying Domoticz (yuck :-) suggests that something is not right.

[philchillbill]

[philchillbill]

I get the verbal warning "Home Assistant did not respond in a timely manner......."

The error I see in the logs is 'Invalid character in header content ["Authorization"]' so it may be that the Bearer token contains unsafe characters and needs to be URL encoded. I'll take a look because the HA docs don't mention it.

EDIT: Well, I already URLencode the token so that's not the issue. Are you sure you copied all the characters of the LLAT and didn't miss one or tack on a space?
Found it (an extra space in your token). Solved by adding a .trim() so give it a whirl.

[Midland45]

Nice one thanks for your assistance
God knows how I ended up with a rogue space in the LLAT.
So I definitely got a green HA icon in the top corner there, however I only had zone temps to 0.5 accuracy. So I exited and re started EvoControl, had to re-authorise.
I've now got an error with the match of some of my schema zone names v TCC zone names, so will have a look at this now.
4 zones are OK, but 6 wont even fuzzy match. Strangely this also alters my Zone Order within EvoControl

[philchillbill]

Nice one thanks for your assistance
God knows how I ended up with a rogue space in the LLAT.
So I definitely got a green HA icon in the top corner there, however I only had zone temps to 0.5 accuracy. So I exited and re started EvoControl, had to re-authorise.
I've now got an error with the match of some of my schema zone names v TCC zone names, so will have a look at this now.
4 zones are OK, but 6 wont even fuzzy match. Strangely this also alters my Zone Order within EvoControl

Yeah, you are missing a number of climate.xxx entries. The skill's error message tells you which ones specifically to help troubleshoot. But it looks like they showed up for you in the meanwhile?

[bruce_miranda]

I didn’t expect any traitors switching between Domoticz/HA vv �� so yes removing the hgi as an in between step will work. I’ll make sure to add a check so that happens automatically.

There are missionary brothers still at play amongst us. I even know of some Domoticz developers who are now actively telling people to move away from that horrible platform that Domoticz has become.

[bruce_miranda]

The rogue trailing space affects many who copy and paste items. So a trim on all user fields would be what I would recommend.

[Midland45]

Yeah, you are missing a number of climate.xxx entries. The skill's error message tells you which ones specifically to help troubleshoot. But it looks like they showed up for you in the meanwhile?

Nope its still missing 6 of my climate entries although all 10 are up and running in HA. EvoControl is trying to match "climate. Bedroom2" etc, but fails to get a match with HA schema. I'll take a look at why it matches fine with eg Bedroom4 but not Bedroom2
Maybe its just still re-bulding the schema, as I did update HA today.
Strangely after failing to match zones, EvoControl mixes the zone order up.

Edit: Can see the 6 zones failing to match still have entity names "ramses_cc_01_xxxxxxx_07" etc etc. So I'll need to resolve this issue, although I suspect Ramses_cc would resolve this anyway after a period of time.

[Midland45]

There are missionary brothers still at play amongst us. I even know of some Domoticz developers who are now actively telling people to move away from that horrible platform that Domoticz has become.

To be honest I took a "bung" to switch camps

[bruce_miranda]

Set restore_cache = false and restart HA a couple of time but space out the restarts by atleast 2-4 hours. Or just wait a while and hopefully ramses_cc will get the zones named. Or just rename the entities yourself to whatever you expect them to be so that they match the TCC zone names. Just remember a SPACE character becomes an _ in the HA entity name.

[philchillbill]

Just remember a SPACE character becomes an _ in the HA entity name.

And everything is lowercased