EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

V2.3 is now live. 2 new commands allow you to lengthen or shorten a named schedule block: e.g. 'Extend bedtime by 30 mins' or 'Shorten lunchtime by 15 mins'. This is effectively schedule-shifting without touching the first switchpoint in the block but pulling in or pushing out all the others.

Also, both widgets are now capable of error reporting whenever TCC/oauth errors occur. There have been a few people who let their TCC oauth go stale by not using the skill for over 6 months. The skill proper would tell you that you need to re-auth but until now the widget(s) could not.

(Would have been posted Dec 6, 2023)

[philchillbill]

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The 2 widgets have been merged into a single widget which now has an Activities button as the first tile. When tapped, it will open a view with a set of buttons for each of your scenes/activities. In addition to your regular Standby activity, you'll see one named 'Standby ♾️' which automatically applies PermanentOverride to this oft-used feature. There's also one named 'Reset ' which sets the system mode to AutoWithReset and effectively 'cancels' an activity by setting all zones to FollowSchedule. If you don't tap any items then the widget returns to the dashboard view after 8s. If you tap any activity button to trigger it then the button flashes several times before returning you again to the dashboard.

As a widget-only feature, if an activity name ends with 1-3 digits plus either an 'm' or apostrophe (shorthand for minutes) then the activity in question will be activated for that particular duration in minutes via a TemporaryOverride. There should be no space(s) between the digits and the m/'. Examples: HW Boost 20m, HW Boost 120', ShowerTime 15m. This only applies when the activity is triggered from a widget and not when triggered by voice or touch from the 'full' skill experience.

Activities are normally not actionable when the System Mode is HeatingOff. You'll see this on the widget in the form of disabled/greyed-out activity names and disabled buttons. However, if you have Evohome DHW and the only item in an activity is Hot Water ON then this can be triggered (with Evohome, Hot Water is always controllable in HeatingOff mode). In Away mode, everything is blocked except for 'Reset '.

Note that the Widget can launch the 'full' skill by tapping on its header/title.

There are also 2 new commands:

"Turn/Switch the heating/system on/off" will set the system mode to Auto or HeatingOff, respectively.
You can also say "Turn on/off the heating".

(Would have been posted Dec 13th)

[philchillbill]

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EvoControl now has an important new feature — zone-specific Eco/Boost. This is achieved by allowing Scenes/Activities to specify a deltagestures in Amazon's APL, which support single-tap, double-tap, long-tap and swipe actions on screen elements.

When editing a scene, a single tap still controls inclusion/exclusion of a zone in an Activity. However, either a long-press or a double-tap on the centre of a tile will switch to the Δ mode of operation for that tile.

New is that a long-presscurrent SP for the zone. When you schedule an Activity to start later today, the delta is with respect to the SP that will normally apply at that time according to the schedule. This can be different to the current SP!

Some other small tweaks:

• Browsing through scenes can now navigate in both directions from 0 so you can e.g. use the prev button to step back to your final Activity in the overall list.
• The blocking of scene-trigger when the System Mode is Away or HeatingOff now also applies to the Activate

(Would have been posted Dec 20, 2023)

[philchillbill]

There's a new button on the Help page inside the skill labelled User Manual. When tapped it will launch what is in essence a modified version of the skill's website (with sections removed plus resized for the Echo's screen size) to take you directly to tappable feature explanations.

If you previously visited the site from inside the skill then you may have to delete the Silk browser's cookies and cached data as it will not have the fresh javascript that carries out the transformation.

The normal Help page inside the skill is really just a list of example spoken commands and it does not explain e.g. how to tap UI elements in the way that the website does.

Hopefully this shortcut will prove useful and encourage people to read up on how to use some of the more advanced features in the skill. By far most users only use a tiny subset of features which is a shame as they are missing out on some really cool ways to increase comfort and also save energy...

(Would have been posted Dec 23, 2023)

[philchillbill]

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Under the 'coming soon' banner, Amazon mentioned that widgets would support an XL format to better make use of horizontal space on smaller screens. There's currently zero documentation on how to implement but with a little playing around I figured it out and Bruce (thanks!) confirmed that my 8" experiments also looked good on the 5" Echo Show.

Today, Amazon certified v2.6 of EvoControl with this new XL widget. There's a staggered rollout so you should receive it automatically in the next day or 2 but if you're impatient you can remove the current widget and re-add it and then the new version will appear immediately. I took this opportunity to definitively delete the original widget that so many of you never saw due to an Amazon bug.

The new XL widget is also responsive to the number of tiles on screen, so if you have 9 zones or less (or DHW and 8 zones or less) you'll see larger tiles . Because the full complement of 12 zones + DHW can all fit on the screen of even the 5", the mask is no longer used and there's never a need to scroll the widget no matter how big your system!

On the second page that appears when you select the ️ Activities button on the main page, there's plenty of space for the max. 12 Activities plus the 'Standby ♾️' and 'Reset' buttons.

On both pages, the extra available width has been put to good use — the outside temperature as known to the skill is now shown in the widget header. SysMode is still shown to the right, together with a icon to indicate demand-count when a HGI-80 is in use. A new feature for those with a HGI is that the aggregated boiler demand is shown as a percentage next to a ♨️ icon in the header. This figure gives an idea of how hard your boiler is actually working to supply the demand of each zone.

(Would have been posted Dec 27, 2023)

[philchillbill]

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The Scenes edit/browse screen has a new button 'LaunchPad' with a cute grid icon that will launch a tap-to-trigger view similar to the widget's scenes buttons view. When you tap any of the icons to trigger the related activity, constraints like ♾️ or 60m are extracted from the scene name ending and are applied. A hint in the footer reminds you of this.

When a scene with a name like Snooze 60m is triggered by voice, the skill will not implement the 60 mins part but will now strip the 60m from the name when telling you that the Snooze activity was triggered. Alexa seems to think 60m is 60 meters and not 60 minutes so that annoyance is now avoided.

When you say activate 'Snooze' and in reality the scene is called Snooze 60m, it's somewhat hit-or-miss whether the fuzzy matching will find a match anyway. If it doesn't, a second match is now attempted against all scene names with any contraints stripped, so there should be a higher succes rate when triggering widget-friendly scene names by voice.

(Would have been posted Dec 29, 2023)

[philchillbill]

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The icons assigned to your scenes in the grid view can now reflect user preference — there are 57 difference icons to choose from. System-created scenes have fixed icons that cannot be changed. Note that after the next certification round in early Jan. these icons will also appear on the widget.

Edit: Now 82 icons


(Would have been posted Dec 30, 2023)

[philchillbill]

Newly certified widget shows the icons you've chosen for your activities and also handles longer activity names by wrapping the caption instead of shrinking it.

There's a reminder on the widget that the icons can be changed inside the skill. This vanishes if you apply at least one custom icon.

If you install the widget without having Evohome at all (as THOUSANDS of Alexa users do all the time) then you can now play with a simulated Evohome setup as a cute demo.


(Would have been posted Jan 4, 2024)

[philchillbill]

Backup and Restore of JSON data for the skill now also includes your custom icons


(Would have been posted Jan 6, 2024)

[philchillbill]

Some changes to the widget:

• The icon for the Activities-launch button on the main widget screen has changed to the LaunchPad grid icon and is bigger. The caption is now also 'LaunchPad' in both EN and DE.
• The default icon for a scene with an unassigned icon has changed to a different movie icon.
• There are 3 new icons in the arsenal, while 1 (guess?) was removed.
• There is a new Baseline system-defined item on the LaunchPad (in both skill and on widget). It restores ABC schedules to each most recent uploaded ABC per zone. If you don't see an abc icon on the button, you're not on the most recent widget version and need to uninstall/re-install.
• The scene buttons on the LaunchPad are a little larger. So are the tiles themselves.
• The Reset button caption has dropped the in the name because that's no longer needed now the buttons themselves have custom icons and therefore stand out better than when just the film icon was on all buttons..
• The tiles on the widget are now gesture-enabled. If you single-tap a tile, if you are using a HGI-80 you'll see the demand-percentage for that zone together with the zone's mode (Auto, Temp/Permanent override). Without a HGI-80 that single-tap will show the zone-mode and no demand info. If you double-tap, you can toggle between dropping a zone down to a 5 deg setpoint until the next scheduled change (i.e. a sort of 'standby' just for that zone), or toggle back to follow-schedule mode for that zone. On the drop to 5, the tile flashes blue with a ❄️ snowflake symbol. You'll also see the next switchpoint data momentarily in the setpoint box. On the way back up to 'normal', the tile flashes orange with a flame symbol.
• Please don't toggle the same zone up/down in rapid succession for fun as TCC does not seem to like that and you can lose sync for a few mins as TCC becomes, er, confused.

(Would have been posted Jan 17, 2024)

[philchillbill]

The widget has some small changes:

• Gestures now work on the DHW tile too.
• A single-tap gesture on any tile will now show the next SP inside the SP frame with ↑, ↓, ↔ symbols to indicate the 'direction' of the next SP compared to the current SP from a heat perspective. The frame will also reflect the colour of the next SP. To the left you'll see the ABC or schedule assigned to the tile.
• Fault status now shows on individual tiles when reported by TCC. You'll see a ⚠️ icon. A single-tap on such a tile will show "Low Battery", "Comms Loss" or "⚡Sensor Fault". When there's a fault with the panel itself you'll see a ⚠️ in the header without any subsequent icon on the tiles.
• The header will show "♻️ Update Available" to remind you that removing/replacing the widget will get you to the latest version.

(Would have been posted Jan 31, 2024)

[philchillbill]

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Amazon has freshly certified v2.8 of EvoControl which brings 2 major new features:

The skill now supports the Round Connected thermostat, which also makes use of TCC behind the scenes for smartphone control. When you first link the skill, if a Round is discovered then the skill will auto-configure accordingly (for example, it only supports 4 system modes instead of 7). You may wonder what the point of EvoControl is for a thermostat with only a single zone, but the Multiple Schedules, Schedule Shifting, Graphing/Charting and Constrained Overrides in EvoControl all work perfectly well and are useful enhancements. The Activities/Scenes paradigm is disabled for the Round as it does not make much sense. Same goes for the Groups concept. All this means that on the widget, having a Round means not displaying the LaunchPad. Thanks to Bruce for giving me remote access to a Round for discovery purposes.

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The second new feature in the skill is that if you have a P1 connection from your Gas meter to Domoticz or Home Assistant, your daily usage and cumulative Gas burn can be shown on the widget on a special tile (see above).

Some small extra tweaks:

• The widget will size things better on e.g. the original 10" Echo Show 2. Which, by the way, is dreadful when it comes to support for this widget as it cannot handle opacity, does not do shortcuts or XL, and is also as slow as molasses. The Echo Show 8" (all 3 generations) provide for a much better widget experience.
• There were also a few corner-case bugs with the Undo functionality which are now corrected.
• A bug with Schedule Shifting when the skill was used in German was fixed.
• You'll notice that the skill now launches with a pictogram of an Evotouch if you have an Evohome system, and a Round if you have one of those.

(Would have been posted Feb 8, 2024)

[philchillbill]

The skill has been updated to handle recent breaking changes in the HA ramses_cc integration (up to 0.41.7). If you update to a recent HA then just do a config update in the skill to pick up the changes. Without DHW in your setup it should actually still work with the previously discovered config.

(Would have been posted Feb 12, 2024)

[philchillbill]

I see several people happily using the widget or viewing the skill's dashboard for days in succession despite 5-7 faults (usually comms loss, low battery) being continually reported by TCC. Apparently, the ⚠️ yellow warning triangles are not enough to get some people to check their fault log. Even tapping the widget will show what the error is but nobody does that either.

From now on, the widget will refuse to show your dashboard and instead show an error message if you have >4 faults in the log. Similarly, the 'full' skill experience will utter a spoken warning upon launch.

I'd say any Evohome system with that many faults is bordering on unusable. Of course with EvoControl being available, people use the Evotouch and the TCC app less and less, so they're not noticing the faults on their panels...


(Would have been posted Mar 1, 2024)

[philchillbill]

Two new features plus a fix:

• You can now query today's gas burn by asking "Alexa, what's today's gas consumption?" (when in-session). You'll of course need to be providing that information via HA or Domoticz so TCC-only users are out of luck.
• The summary command will now mention gas burn at the end, if known.
• The widget tiles were always blocked gesture-wise when the system mode was Away or Heating Off (except for DHW's tile). However, when you have a red border on a tile due to a HA/Domoticz zone-fault, that meant you could not tap to find the source of the problem without first switching modes. That's now fixed so a red border always allows a single-tap gesture.

(Would have been posted Mar 4, 2024)