EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

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 👍

I can see in the logs that you are using an Alexa device with an UNKNOWN-VIEWPORT-PROFILE which means the visuals might be way off. May I ask what kind of device it is? Do the screens look well laid out or are they all over the place?

[philchillbill]

I just fixed a bug with assigning custom icons to Scenes/Activities (sorry Glyn)

[spence189]

I can see in the logs that you are using an Alexa device with an UNKNOWN-VIEWPORT-PROFILE which means the visuals might be way off. May I ask what kind of device it is? Doe the screens look well laid out or are they all over the place?

Hey, yes I got it all up and running today on my son's old Fire Tablet 10hd. It has an Show Mode that turns it into a basic Echo Show device. Layout is absolutely fine for me. I've got a Echo Show 8 coming over the next few days and that will act as a more permanent setup.

Here's a quick update that you may or may not find useful 😁

Nabu Casa is the official home assistant remote access solution and proxies connections back to HA. I've setup EvoControl with this and it works ok, but as you say this is not necessary.

With regards to automating EvoControl from Home Assistant. I have managed to achieve this using Alexa routines and Home Assistants Alexa Media Player Integration. Home Assistant can trigger a routine via an automation or other. My usecases for this is to have home assistant auto trigger EvoControl based on weather/temperature or other events.

I'm still getting my head around EvoControl but it's a fantastic addition to EvoHome. One question I had, which I could deal with using the ABC custom schedules, was if there was any way of having a scene that sets the temperature to setpoint + or - x degrees. From what I can tell the behaviour of the scene either sets a specific temperature or it increases/decreases the current temperature by a specific interval. So in the current scenes setup, if you activate scene 1 and this increases the temp by 1c then activated scenes 2 which increases the temp by 2c they you end up with setpoint +3c. If you then activate scene 1 again you are at 4c above setpoint.

Ideally I'd love it if I could have a very similar setup but each scene apply the configured interval. So in the above scenario you would end up back at setpoint +1 when you activate the scenes in that order.

Not sure if that makes sense but my usecases is to have scenes that increase/ decrease the temp based on multiple factors within Home Assistant. I currently achieve this using eco mode and cold weather boost but it would be great to be able to customise it full with EvoControl.

Thanks for listening.
Spence

[philchillbill]

Deltas are deliberately accumulative and SPs are supplantive. That's because EC has no way of knowing what other controllers change things in Evohome after it does something. Remember, your panel plus the TCC app on all family-members' smartphones can change anything just after EC was used by somebody else. Trying to guess what just changed outside EC's scope would likely disappoint more often than delight.

Plus, scene 1 may affect different zones than scene 2. Say scene 1 sets up the playroom for gaming while scene 2 heats the bathroom for taking a shower. If activating scene 2 would deactivate scene 1 before it kicks in then the gamer in the house would be quite unhappy.

If you want guaranteed SPs regardless of how often scene(s) are activated in succession then use SPs instead of Deltas.

I will be adding a feature this weekend to make the Delta optionally apply w.r.t the current actual. So if it feels a bit chilly then a delta of +1 will use whatever SP it needs to increase the current actual temperature by 1 deg. It'll be a toggle on the Settings screen.

[philchillbill]

bruce_miranda asked for a new feature to (optionally) mute spoken feedback when touch-inputs are used rather than voice to issue a command. Use case is e.g. a bedroom where SWMBO is still asleep when you tap some changes into EC and you don't want to wake her. You'll see a new toggle to select muting on/off on the Settings screen. Default is OFF, so tapping will produce spoken feedback (as was the current behaviour before the feature was added).

I've finally managed to handcraft a pretty realistic scrollbar to indicate when scrolling is possible and where the current scroll-position is with respect to the total height on-screen/off-screen. You'll already see it on the Settings page on an Echo 8" for the toggle-switches area. This can replace the dancing scroll-button that some screens display when you have a lot of zones and a smaller screen so I'll work on that over the next few days. I cannot fathom why the devs at Amazon graced APL with a ScrollView without an attendant scrollbar. Luckily, it can be emulated manually with some coloured Frames and clever use of event-handlers.

EDIT: I've now made it a per-Echo setting as you may want different settings on e.g. a Bedroom Echo vs a Kitchen Echo

[spence189]

Thanks for the feedback, I understand the reasoning and the intended usecases and have no issues either way. I think I'm trying to use it in a different way and automate in such a way that we don't have to manually adjust temperature (even though it's only speaking at Alexa 😁). I'll keep playing around as it's a fantastic tool thanks for all your work on it and the new features sound great.

[spence189]

Couple of screenshots from the fire tablet 10hd, if you wanted to check the formatting.

[philchillbill]

Thanks. I wonder why it doesn’t just report as being a Fire Tablet instead of unknown? Is its firmware up to date?

[spence189]

Yeah it's up-to-date, no idea. It's not really an echo show, it's got a toggle switch that turns it into an echo show so maybe that's why.

[philchillbill]

All screens will now display the new scrollbar when needed, meaning the dancing scroll-button is gone. All except for the main help-screen that is. Due to an Amazon bug in the Sequence Controller, it's not possible to make it work on that screen.

[philchillbill]

The settings screen now has a toggle to select whether you want deltas in immediately-activated scenes to apply with respect to the current SP or with respect to the current actual temperature in the zone in question. Default behaviour is SP as it has always been before this new feature.

Say a zone has an SP of 15 and an actual of 20. A delta of +1 applying to the SP won't do anything for you because changing the SP from 15 to 16 will have no effect when the actual is 20.

If the toggle is set to ON then the +1 will be added to the 20 instead and the new SP will be 21, resulting in heat-demand and the room getting a bit warmer. This applies to negative deltas too.

Note that it does not apply to scheduled scene-activations, like "Schedule MovieTime from 8PM for 2 hours" because the actual temp in the future is an unknown.

[spence189]

Will give this a go, thanks 🙏

[philchillbill]

I just noted that the intro post in this thread had become badly messed up, probably after the recent forum-login issue and the rollback to an earlier vBulletin. Anyway, I've edited it manually so should be correct again.

[philchillbill]

The skill has a new setting for people with multiple locations/panels in their TCC account (it won't appear in the settings unless that applies to you). It allows making the location selection a per-device rather than per-Amazon-account setting. So e.g. if you have an Echo upstairs in a room that's heated from panel 2, you can have that Echo stay on panel 2 until changed, even though the Livingroom Echo 'stays' on panel 1 until changed.

[freeranger]

Is there any way to “uninstall: the skill from a specific Fire tablet and reinstall it?
Hasn’t worked on my Fire 8HD for over a month now and it is bang up to date with Fire OS 8.3.3.2 installed on 5th Jan
It still just does not respond to anything 99% of the time when I fire it up on the tablet.
I see the UI but none of the buttons respond at all.
My Echo 5” works fine, but is too small which is why I bought the Fire HD 8 so I’d really like to get it going again.

Has anyone else had a similar problem and managed to fix it?

thanks