EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

Macros are now included in backups and can also be restored from a file on your PC/Mac to the skill.

[philchillbill]

For a brief while this afternoon the skill was forcing a German locale as I had been testing some new UI strings and that file accidentally went live. It's corrected now. Apologies!

[philchillbill]

Now that I actually have a 5" Echo to test with I found out that the Amazon APL simulator is quite a bit off compared to reality. Screens that were cropping in some places have now been updated. They look fine on my Gen III but YMMV if you have an older 5".

[jweaver]

I am sure I asked something similar a few weeks ago, but I can't find the reply..

I have just got home from work and found the house cold.. When I looked at the controller, 2 of the rooms are hot and the rest cold and it looks very like my "Work From Home" activity is active (is it possible to check the active Activity?).. This is odd, as I havn't activated it for a while.. I wonder if the last time I did, I did it indefinitely, rather than putting an "until" clause in. Would that even cause this?

Now I can't get it out of this mode and am not sure what to do.

I always thought that "set all zones to baseline" was the solution, but that hasn't worked.. So I did "upload schedule A everywhere", which I had written in my notes.. This did not work, but when I went to the EvoHome I found todays schedule was messed up.. I am not sure if the "Upload" did this or whether something else went wrong..

Anyway, I corrected it manually by copying all of the temperatures settings from Tuesday to Wednesday (on the Evohome) and how I have Wednesday (Today) set correctly setup, but the temperatures are still wrong and the icon for every zone shows a tablet (which if I remember rightly means its been updated by Evocontrol).

i am a bit lost now to be honest.. How do I get everything back to "normal", so that EvoHome is just following its own schedule and EvoControl is not doing anything?

I hope what I have written makes sense.

[philchillbill]

First off, you cannot check the active Activity. Evohome allows itself to be controlled by the mobile app, the panel, and EvoControl. EvoControl is not in permanent communication with your system, it just checks the status-quo from TCC every time the skill or widget is launched and reports that state. It could try to see if that current state happens to match an Activity and indicate that this Activity is thus active. But what should we then say about zones that the activity doesn't touch?

'Baseline' remembers the most recent ABC that was uploaded to a zone. It's better than just saying "upload schedule A everywhere" because it will remember if any zones were actually on B or C and not inadvertently overwrite them with A. But if you have any heavily-modified schedules that you didn't save under ABC then calling Baseline will overwrite those so you always need to think for a second before using that command.

Evohome is always following whatever it was most recently told to do. EvoControl is never "doing anything" unless it's active on your screen and you literally issued some touch/voice command in the last 2 seconds or so. Otherwise it 'evaporates'. It doesn't even 'run' on your Echo although you have that illusion because the Echo 'holds' the display. When the Echo needs EvoControl to do something, it fires the skill up in the cloud, the skill tells TCC what you wanted, the skill updates your Echo's display, and 'poof' the skill dies within a second.

What most likely happened to you is that you accidentally scheduled an Activity instead of just activating it (constrained or otherwise). You may even have done that last week. Because TCC only handles one schedule (the one EvoControl calls' live'), any scheduled activity inherently changes the live schedule in TCC. And that change repeats every week because all weeks are the same to Evohome. If you ever temporarily change a schedule you must revert to normal sometime before the week expires or the changes repeat ad infinitum.

Resideo sporadically has very brief outages where API commands are not handled. Their mobile app doesn't report an error when this happens: you'll just notice your UI entry is ignored and so you try it again and it succeeds the second time. EvoControl does actually tell you when TCC fails to confirm a requested change, listing the zone(s) that missed out on the new state. So it's important to always listen to the spoken feedback Alexa gives when you issue an EvoControl command via either the UI or by voice. If you try to activate an Activity and several zones miss the new state, you can re-try 10 seconds later and it very likely will succeed then.

Evohome is always "...following it's own schedule". Your question to yourself should be "where did Evohome get this current schedule from"? Was it an uploaded ABC, a manual edit made in the EvoControl schedule-editor, a voice-edit like "make it 20 deg in the kitchen at 4PM", a scheduled-activity like "Activate WatchTV at 7PM"? Particularly the "at" vs "until" can bite as "...until 7PM" just does a TemporaryOverride and will not touch the schedule, whereas "...at 7PM" edits the schedule (permanenlty, unless revoked).

[Ghostrider]

Anyone else having problems today? I had to reauthorise the TCC link in Evocontrol and disable - re enable the skill in alexa. I still had local control via domoticz and dongle but Home Assistant will not login via the credentials.

I presume the problem is with TCC and was wondering if i was alone with it.

[philchillbill]

It looks like the TCC authorization server is acting up. I can see messages like "The authorization server have encoutered an error while processing your request. Please try again later" in bad English (TCC suffers a lot from that) in the logs. So not only was my original auth rejected because TCC could not renew it, but my manual re-auth failed too. No idea how long this will last.

[Ghostrider]

Thanks for the quick reply Phil. Looks like we will just have to wait it out then.

[G4RHL]

[Ghostrider]

It appears all back to normal now.

[G4RHL]

Thanks, and yes OK my end as well.

[philchillbill]

It's now possible to use Google One-Tap Single-Sign-On for account creation/login with the user dashboard. Tested on Chrome on PC, plus on Chrome and Safari on iOS/ iPadOS/macOS.

[spence189]

EDIT: I signed up and had a quick play, I think I've answered most of my questions. I hadn't realised it was free to sign up at the moment.


Happy new year! Thinking about signing up to give this a go as the features seem amazing.

Most of my home automation is done via Home Assistant. I have Alexa as well but I'm slowly becoming less dependent on Alexa.

I have a couple of questions that I couldn't find answers for with regards to home assistant integration.

This appears to be possible - I use Nabu Casa for my remote proxy, is this supported for access from evocontrol?

Not relevant - If not then do you have specified IPs addresses that I can allow through my firewall into Home Assistant?

I've not got an Echo Show but it looks like all of the setup/control is via the Amazon skill then voice so this is not possible - Can I use Home Assistant automations to change/trigger schedules and other settings in EvoControl?

Can't work out at the mo as I hadn't realised an echo show was required - Is a there some info on what functionality is available via the home assistant integration when evohome servers are offline.

Looking at the reliance on the Amazon Skill I'm guessing this is very unlikely - Is there any chance that EvoControl could/would be able to run locally in docker or as a Home Assistant add-on to reduce reliance on the internet/evohome servers?

Sorry for all the questions. I'll see if I can grab an echo show to have a proper play.

Thanks
Spence

[philchillbill]

Many happy returns!

Hope your Alexa device(s) have a screen, as most of the EvoControl (EC) features depend heavily on that. TBH 8" is the sweet spot. The little 5" is useable but not a joy to behold.

As long as your HA has a https URL for access (joebloggs.duckdns.com) and a long-lived access token you can link to HA. No idea what Nabu Casa is.

Amazon uses tens of thousands of IP addresses and changes them every day so whitelisting is not feasible.

EvoControl runs in an AWS Lambda and relies heavily on the internet, no way around that.

HA does not interface to EC, it's the other way around. And even then only if you have an RF device like a HGI-80 in use with HA, so not the web/TCC integration.

When TCC is down, EC talks to HA in a read-only mode so nothing can be changed/set in Evohome. It's Domoticz that's read/write when TCC is down. I know everybody thinks the GUI in HA is better than Domoticz but the API in Domoticz is better than the HA API. It's better documented too. The HA docs may look fancy from a CSS/layout perspective but they are quite lacking in content/details needed to get any real work done.

I presume you have seen the docs at https://smartskills.tech/evocontrol, specifically under the Smart Home Integration section?

In all honesty, EC works for 99% without the HA/Domoticz integration. All you really get is graphs, demand percentages and 0.1 deg resolution over 0.5. If you want that then just lok at your HA dashboard. All the comfort/savings features of EC don't need the HA integration and rely 100% on TCC and my back-end.

[spence189]

Thanks for the speedy response. I updated my original post after signing up to the service. It's stuck in moderation.

I'll see if I can grab an echo and have a play soon 👍