EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[Midland45]

Your comment around marketing is spot on. I wouldn't have gone evohome if it wasn't for someone recommending it & subsequently diving into it.

Looking at alternatives, I haven't seen anything surpass functionality/flexibility of evohome yet, despite its age.

I've seen a number of friends get a "smart heating" system installed, only to realise it's basically what they had before except just they can view the temperature remotely & switch on/off from an app, offering no more granular control..

Evocontrol is a very refreshing extension to the functionality & I'll certainly will be in line to cough up when the time comes.

I can also thoroughly recommend using Evocontrol not just from a functionality point of view, but also from an economic view. Having used it for approx 5 months of the last heating season, I can see a significant reduction in energy use, during this period. I put this down to utilising Evocontrol’s abilities through Activities/Scenes to allow me to dynamically alter set points across the home to match the zones in use.
So for me, I can see the paying the modest annual fee, considering the amount of work/effort/development/knowledge/expense and support Phil has and also continues to put in on Evocontrol is a no brainer. Add to this it will probably in my case, be covered by the saving on my energy bills within 2 months of the heating session!

[philchillbill]

https://vimeo.com/857627661

Here's a video teasing a new feature that's just about ready for release. Any questions or suggestions can still be accommodated at this stage as it's not yet submitted to Amazon for voice-model approval.

What's a good name for this: schedule-shifting, rescheduling, or schedule-advance?

[philchillbill]

https://vimeo.com/857867689

I improved the UI so that changes to tomorrow's schedule are also briefly shown on the screen in the little appendage for 10 sec.

[philchillbill]

I've also added an undo function for Schedule Shifting and the possibility to query so you can ask e.g. "Alexa, at what time is 'Going to Bed'?" or "Alexa, when is 'Wake Up' tomorrow?". She'll mention the time and the first impacted zone/setpoint, plus highlight it all briefly on the dashboard.

[philchillbill]

activate a scene and set"... XXX already exists (or clashes with a zone name or reserved word) ! Please enter an alternative name or abort".

[philchillbill]

I finally figured out a way to keep the status of the hints revolver at the bottom of the screen between TCC refreshes, so you should now see all the hints pass by instead of having the first batch repeated continually. They are randomized for each new session so you may not even have noticed the cropped repeat but anyway it's resolved now.

[philchillbill]

I just won't have time to implement the payment back-end for this yet so I've updated the website to say that Oct 1st is the new starting point. I've also dropped the price to twenty quid from twenty-five.

The website has a new introduction section that explains 6 ways you can use EvoControl to deviate from baseline schedule. It mentions schedule-shifting which is not yet live but will be pretty soon...

[Somebody]

[philchillbill]

[Somebody]

That's easy enough. Many thanks.

[philchillbill]

The weather icons used by the skill were a trifle skeumorphic (like iOS 6 used to be before all the icons became more Material-like) so I decided to switch to a new look:

[philchillbill]

ngrok free static domains

For anybody using a HGI-80 (clone) via Domoticz, it may be useful to know that ngrok now issues fixed domain names to free accounts. These survive server restarts and are therefore really useful for accessing Domoticz remotely.

https://ngrok.com/blog-post/free-static-domains-ngrok-users

The fixed domains use normal words separated by hyphens and are therefore pretty easy to remember, e.g. https : / / dog-cat-mouse.ngrok-free.app

After claiming a domain in your ngrok account, all you need to do is add a single line to your ngrok config YAML file under the tunnels entry:

domain: dog-cat-mouse.ngrok-free.app​​​

I'm therefore going to kill off my easyngrok service which worked with a uuid to 'tell' EvoControl when your ngrok URL changed after a restart.

[bruce_miranda]

So very similar to the duckdns and nginx solution used to access HA from outside.

[philchillbill]

Amazon promising big improvements in Alexa next year:

https://www.amazon.science/blog/alexa-unveils-new-speech-recognition-text-to-speech-technologies

[philchillbill]

Schedule Shifting which lets you advance or defer key 'moments' within your daily routine on the fly.

To set it up, using the new S-BlocksTargets buttons on the screen above to start the selection. This uses the familiar touchscreen-editor you will already have seen for both groups and schedule-cloning:





Any time you invoke a schedule-shift command, EvoControl will check which of the target zones have any upcoming schedule-switchpoints that fall inside the blockquerytoday (default when omitted) or tomorrowbaselineWidget which shows the current system-state (Auto, Eco/Boost, Custom, DayOff, Away or Off) via a coloured icon in the header. Additionally, any Activities listed in the widget which are disallowed due to the current system state (Away/Off) will have their name(s) greyed out and also struck-through. Sadly, with the current Amazon widget-bug still unresolved, YMMV as to whether you see the widget at all or whether you keep the older version instead of seeing the new widget.

Enjoy!