EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

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

I don't have any Fire Tablets to check with, unfortunately. But installing is something you do into your Amazon account, not onto a device. The only thing you can do at device-level is restore factory settings and then realign with your account.

Looking at the APL support table at https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/d...device-support, the tablets are still on 2022.2 while the skill requires a minimum of 2023.1. All other devices are already on 2024.2 or higher.

[philchillbill]

It's long been known among Skill developers that Alexa largely ignores the idleTimeout parameter in APL documents. In theory you can specify how long you want a certain display to 'hold' on the user's screen before exiting back to the regular Echo home-screen. EvoControl traditionally set that to 4 minutes for the dashboard because longer made no sense as even the 4 mins was almost never 'attained'.

Amazon appears to have recently pushed buggy firmware to Echos because the skill (not the widget) seems to stay open practically indefinitely on both my 5" and 8" Echos. So give it a whirl and maybe you'll have an EvoControl appliance at your disposal until Amazon fixes the bug

[philchillbill]

Screenshot 2025-01-15 175056.png

System-wide Schedule Comparison

There's a new button on the main dashboard that looks like a stacked bar-chart icon. When tapped, it will display today's schedules for all your zones (plus DHW) side-by-side for easy comparison. It's like a vertical version of the schedule overview that your Evotouch panel can draw horizontally. The page has a badge button in the top-right corner to take you to the next day.

When viewing a schedule for a single zone (or DHW) after tapping a tile on the dashboard, upon tapping the More button you'll see that there are now 2x Compare ABC buttons instead of just one. The leftmost one draws the familiar linechart variant of your A-B-C plus Live schedules, while the new rightmost button will draw a barchart variant along the same lines as the plot above:

Screenshot 2025-01-15 175322.png

As a reminder, there's no need to update or re-install to get this as EvoControl runs in the cloud and you always use the most up-to-date version. Thanks to Anthony for suggesting this feature!

[philchillbill]

I've added a second badge to the System-wide Schedule Comparison screen so that you can also cycle between Live-A-B-C in that view. Any zones that don't have a particular preset saved will show a gray bar.

[philchillbill]

The bars on the schedule overview views can now be tapped to launch the corresponding grid/editor view of the schedule in question.

[philchillbill]

Resideo had some kind of an outage earlier today which wasn't reporting as a 503 error but just manifesting as hung-requests. That means that those of you with Domoticz connected didn't see the fallback because that relies explicitly on Resideo saying the service is down. So it wasn't you (or me), it was Resideo.

On a different topic, I noticed somebody on a screenless Echo with a zone called 'Dining' on the panel keeps failing when asking the skill to set 'Dining Room' to a certain setpoint. So I've added to the code that if a zone match fails then it's retried without the word 'room' if it was included in the spoken command just in case that matches. But hey, why not use your actual zone names with the skill?

[philchillbill]

I noticed that the firmware on the Echo 5 gen III displays different arrows on the setpoint appendages than the other Echos. They are coloured inside a box instead of just being a small black arrow. Well https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/ has lots of alternatives so I've swapped them out and they now look good on both the Echo Show 5 gen III and the Show 8 gen II and III.

I've also added a 'Defaults' button to the Macros definition screen so that you can revert to the defaults of ‘5 deg / DHW On’ in one swoop if desired. On that topic, it seems nobody is playing with the Macros. I would have thought the feature would be highly popular so I was either wrong or nobody has discovered them yet...

[Bluestraw]

Just installed this today and it's great, I want to tidy up my schedules now... Is there a way to copy one day's schedule to another? I've ended up with a messy 'Monday to Friday' setup in some rooms and want to fix that all in one go.

[philchillbill]

It’s easier to do day-to-day copying in the TCC app. The skill takes a week-by-week approach instead. You can copy from zone to zone and from Live to an ABC but not from day to day. That said, a long-tap on a cell in the schedule editor will select a whole row to modify in one swoop so that’s an easy way to fix a schedule that doesn’t quite do what you want.

[philchillbill]

• The B and C schedules have new green and blue colours for better contrast on all screens throughout the whole skill.
• The settings screen has a new help button like the other screens have.
• Settings has a redesigned one-line header to allow more height for real content.
• On settings, the're a new EditText area adjacent to the ABC Nicknames with a white outline, This can be used to set a default Zone for the Echo in question (this was only possible by voice until now). As a reminder, with a default zone defined you can omit the zone name, meaning you can say the likes of "Alexa, make it 20 deg for half an hour".

[philchillbill]

The AutoWithReset system mode has been added to the tappable SysMode-switcher. This sets all zones back to follow-schedule, so it represents a way to cancel all active Scenes/Activities. In the UI, it's called 'Reset' and it does the same as saying "Alexa, reset the system mode".

[philchillbill]

When Cloning a schedule from zone-to-zone, it's now possible to clone to an entire Group.

This is a precursor to a new feature 'Group Schedules' which I'm working on. It will basically mean you'll be able to assign zones to stay in sync schedule-wise so that you'll only have to edit a schedule in one place and have it automatically repeated across the participating zones. That will only happen inside EvoControl of course so if you modify a synced zone's schedule from e.g. the Panel or the TCC app then you'll break that sync.

[philchillbill]

Amazon has freshly certified v4.0 of EvoControl, meaning there's an updated widget (unlike other visuals, I cannot change that without Amazon's approval so it only updates when certification is requested):

• Double-tapping tiles to trigger Macros will now display new symbols (an Ⓜ️ when applying the Macro and 🧿 when re-tapped to FollowSchedule). If you haven't defined any Macros (shame on you!) then the default behaviour of drop to 5 deg / return to schedule will display ❄️and 🔥 as before.
• The SysMode icon on the widget is now tappable to change the mode in the same way as it can be changed by tapping that icon on the skill dashboard. You can also constrain via a slider and the AutoWithReset mode (which the API supports but not your Evotouch) is there to help 'undo' activities/scenes.
• That SysMode popup has a help icon to the left that will remind those of you who only ever look at the widget and never tap it what widget-features you could be using.
• If you launch the widget 100 times without a single launch of the skill, you'll see a nag screen reminding you that the widget is nice and all but there's a lot more functionality in the skill that may be useful from time to time. For example, schedule advance/delay.

That tappable SysMode icon means tapping the entire widget-header to launch the skill had to change — only the left portion of the header will now do this. In order to widen that and make an easier tap-target, the skill invocation name (Smart Heat / Wärmesteuerung) has been added to the header on XL widgets.

If Amazon does not push out the new widget to you immediately, deleting the current one and re-adding it will do the trick (not the skill, just the widget). If your device only supports the old 'M' swipe-in widget and not the XL one, maybe first try and add the new one, and, if it succeeds, delete the old one (rather than deleting the old one to discover the new one won't install). I actually sold my Echo Show gen 2 10" device because Amazon messed up the M-widget support so badly with a buggy firmware update over a year ago. On the 8" and 5" Echos there is no issue as they all support XL.

Enjoy!

[philchillbill]

image.png
TCC is currently down for maintenance and is just dropping https requests with no response whatsoever (they usually provide a 503 for me to trap and report). So nothing's working in the skill or widget but all you'll see is a generic error message due to their ignoring requests completely. If you have the new widget already you'll see an icon with a cloud and exclamation in addition to the error message text


EDIT: I've now added a new error message for when this happens so you'll be told the auth-server at Resideo is offline.

[philchillbill]

From the dev docs regarding today’s big announcement of Alexa+:

“If you're an existing Alexa skill developer, customers using the original Alexa experience will retain access to all your skills. You can continue to refine, re-certify, republish, and also create new skills on original Alexa. We will continue to support original Alexa, but new developer tools will be focused on Alexa+.“