EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[jweaver]

I can see that Honeywell is still issuing oauth for the older IDs so apparently their system is unaware that they changed your IDs.

In retrospect, the skill gets the updated oauth the moment you re-do it on my account dashboard so it's actually unnecessary to ask the skill to update the config (I forgot I already implemented that over the Summer).

What may help is if you go to your TCC login page and delete/re-add your location to your TCC account. This is also the way to get rid of ghost zones so it's done regularly by people and is not that scary a thing to do. Then re-auth on my dashboard and open the skill.

..

[philchillbill]

I see several people using the skill for the first time in over 6 months so they are having to re-auth.

I've changed that error message to remind people that tokens have a maximum life of 6 months so that they don't think it's an error as such and realise it's just a security measure.

[philchillbill]

Didnt work… deleted my location.. added it.. them reauthed from your website and still get them same error…

I can delete your entire database entry if you like and that will force the skill to discover you as a new user. Then I can put back your scenes and saved schedules if you don't have a backup to upload. Or do you have a backup yourself?

[jweaver]

I can delete your entire database entry if you like and that will force the skill to discover you as a new user. Then I can put back your scenes and saved schedules if you don't have a backup to upload. Or do you have a backup yourself?

[philchillbill]

[philchillbill]

@jweaver you can now give it a try just by launching the skill. Whenever TCC realignment is needed, the skill saves a flag which is checked upon launch. If it's set, the skill automatically retrieves all your data from TCC and places any new IDs into your saved data structure without you needing to do anything special. You lose nothing of saved activities, groups, etc in the process. If it succeeded, you'll be told that realignment occurred. If you just get the same old error it means Honeywell is still handing out incorrect oauth based on your old IDs. It could also mean you haven't yet done a re-auth on your account dashboard.

If it does not work, try a fresh re-auth on the account dashboard and then open the skill and see if that does it.

If it works, it'll work again whenever Honeywell resolves your ISP Smart Weather issue.

Fingers crossed.

[jweaver]

@jweaver you can now give it a try just by launching the skill. Whenever TCC realignment is needed, the skill saves a flag which is checked upon launch. If it's set, the skill automatically retrieves all your data from TCC and places any new IDs into your saved data structure without you needing to do anything special. You lose nothing of saved activities, groups, etc in the process. If it succeeded, you'll be told that realignment occurred. If you just get the same old error it means Honeywell is still handing out incorrect oauth based on your old IDs. It could also mean you haven't yet done a re-auth on your account dashboard.

If it does not work, try a fresh re-auth on the account dashboard and then open the skill and see if that does it.

If it works, it'll work again whenever Honeywell resolves your ISP Smart Weather issue.

Fingers crossed.

Awesome work.. I will test tonight as I am in the office today.

Honeywell closed my fault at the weekend (even though they said they were passing it on).. So I am giving up with that, instead I am going to work with VF.. I finally found someone with VF Broadband and they can get the WeatherAPI URL, so I dont' think this is a VF fault after all... I wonder if they simply 'block' it as it looks suspicious having this URL polled constantly.

So i am going to work with Vodafone instead, and luckily I work for the company who support their Routers to build their network.. So i am going to reach out to a few contacts to see if I can find someone at VF who can look at this.

Anyway, I digress... I will test Evohome as soon as get home.. Thanks for your help with this..

Jon

[jweaver]

@jweaver you can now give it a try just by launching the skill. Whenever TCC realignment is needed, the skill saves a flag which is checked upon launch. If it's set, the skill automatically retrieves all your data from TCC and places any new IDs into your saved data structure without you needing to do anything special. You lose nothing of saved activities, groups, etc in the process. If it succeeded, you'll be told that realignment occurred. If you just get the same old error it means Honeywell is still handing out incorrect oauth based on your old IDs. It could also mean you haven't yet done a re-auth on your account dashboard.

If it does not work, try a fresh re-auth on the account dashboard and then open the skill and see if that does it.

If it works, it'll work again whenever Honeywell resolves your ISP Smart Weather issue.

Fingers crossed.

That worked.. No need to reauth. Just came home, launched SmartHeat and got the message saying that it was retrieving my data and now I am back up and running.. Amazing work.. Thanks for your help with this.

Hope this fix helps others.

[philchillbill]

That worked.. No need to reauth. Just came home, launched SmartHeat and got the message saying that it was retrieving my data and now I am back up and running.. Amazing work.. Thanks for your help with this.

Hope this fix helps others.

Good to hear. I did a diff of your old and new database entries for the skill and I can see that Honeywell had changed all

[jweaver]

Good to hear. I did a diff of your old and new database entries for the skill and I can see that Honeywell had changed all

That is weird.. I suspect it was a scatter gun approach.. All I asked them to do was look at my post here (about the lack of weather features) and see if someone in "design" might be interested in taking a look.. But it seems that perhaps they tried to fix this themselves and reset a lot of things.

I really like your fix. Worked really well..

Jon

[philchillbill]

A few noteworthy tweaks:

• Theres a new 'Brevity' toggle-switch on the settings page to prevent callout of a long list of demand percentages when lots of rooms are cold and you can see the percentages on your screen anyway. On devices without a screen, the full list is still called out regardless, as otherwise you won't know where the demand is.
• The sblocks edit screen now has a usage hint in the footer. Otherwise it wasn't intuitive that tapping on the outlines opens an editor.
• Schedule shifting is now allowed even if the block in question has already started, provided that no zones have yet had a switchpoint inside the block actually applied yet. It used to be that start-of-block was blocking instead of 1st switchpoint.
• There's a link to this forum inside the skill's Help page. Your Echo Show has a browser, so hey...

[Somebody]

How would one ask SmartHeat to set a zone to X degrees for a set time period please? I get an error when I asked "Alexa, set lounge to 20 degrees from 7pm to 10pm".

Thanks

[Somebody]

Sorry, another question - would I be right in saying that I won't be able to make any changes in temperature via the mobile app whilst SmartHeat is displayed/invoked?

TIA

[philchillbill]

Starting with your 2nd question, EvoControl Smart Heat co-exists peacefully with both your panel and the mobile app so any of them can be used at any time to control your Evohome system.

On the 1st question, saying "Alexa, set lounge to 20 degrees from 7pm to 10pm" is valid syntax. I just tried it now and it inserted a switchpoint into the zone's schedule. What exact error did you get?

EDIT: The expected syntax is "from 7PM until 10pm" so you may have more luck with that. The 'to' variant is getting into fuzzy-matching territory and can be hit-and-miss.

[philchillbill]

I saw that somebody with only a single zone (plus DHW) linked the skill and that gave me the idea to automatically set the default zone so that you can always omit its name in commands requiring a zone to be specified (at least from the first Echo you speak to after linking the skill). I guess I never expected anybody to buy Evohome just to have a single zone

Secondly, the Enlarge setting (for showing larger tiles and potentially requiring scrolling on smaller screens) is now Echo specific, meaning you can have different true/false on different Echos. That makes sense if you have Echos with different screen sizes in use as not all may require enlargement.