EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[philchillbill]

Just remember that battery % is only reported by the HR92, the HR80 only reports a Battery Low warning no percentage.

Thanks, yeah I saw in the Domoticz source-code that nBattery and nLowBat exist and that the level is reported as 0 if nLowBat is triggered. In that case I don't show a % value but just a warning text.

[philchillbill]

Just fixed a bug which prevented editing DHW schedules by voice . No need to do anything to get it as you always use the most recent build of the skill upon each use.

[philchillbill]

Diagnostics



Individualised fault conditions are now shown directly on each zone's tile in the Dashboard view (see image).

This information is retrieved from the activeFaults array and the temperatureStatus.isAvailable parameter as returned by TCC, so it's also shown without a HGI-80.

[philchillbill]

[philchillbill]

From the skill's logs, somebody who set up a HGI-80 and Domoticz got a boatload of errors because they had both the USB and Web-API interfaces to Evohome set up and had mixed the two device types in the Roomplan.

I've modified the code to check for this and barf if necessary so should not happen again.

[philchillbill]

To fix a synchronization problem when a user first-runs the skill and already has a HGI-80 enabled in the dashboard, the skill will first run with just TCC data and pick up the HGI data upon the first screen-refresh. This means that the first ever time you use a HGI-80 you will see temperature rounding to 0.5 deg until that refresh has occurred. Thereafter you'll see the expected 0.1 deg accuracy.

[Stevedh]

To fix a synchronization problem when a user first-runs the skill and already has a HGI-80 enabled in the dashboard, the skill will first run with just TCC data and pick up the HGI data upon the first screen-refresh. This means that the first ever time you use a HGI-80 you will see temperature rounding to 0.5 deg until that refresh has occurred. Thereafter you'll see the expected 0.1 deg accuracy.

That would explain an issue I had when trying to set this up a while ago.

[Stevedh]

I have recently had a couple of times when starting smart heat on an echo show has resulted in a black screen. Both times exiting and trying again seems to have sorted it. Not sure if thats an issue on amazon's side, my network or the skill.

BTW I really like the demand command.

[philchillbill]

I have recently had a couple of times when starting smart heat on an echo show has resulted in a black screen. Both times exiting and trying again seems to have sorted it. Not sure if thats an issue on amazon's side, my network or the skill.

BTW I really like the demand command.

That is more likely either an Amazon thing (the skill runs in an AWS Lambda function) or my account-management back-end (which runs on my hosting provider for the smartskills.tech website) being slow/unresponsive, rather than the skill's code itself doing nothing. This happens sporadically. However, I often notice that the Echo device seems busy under the hood doing something else rather than reacting to touch inputs. Particularly on the Echo Show 2 (10"). The Echo Show 8 2nd gen recently got a firmware update and seems to have improved in that respect. But the firmware in the Shows is still not 100%. It might be your network but there's not a whole load of bandwidth needed to shovel JSON back and forth between AWS and your Echo so I doubt it.

Good that you like the demand. Have you noticed the varying opacity of the flame symbols on the dashboard?

[philchillbill]

I tweaked the response to the Heat Demand and Summary queries to have more textual variations in how they're spoken. When there is no demand, it's stated as such rather than saying "... there is heat demand from zero zones".

[philchillbill]

I added a back-button to the main dashboard screen so that you don't have to always say "Alexa, exit" to terminate a session on devices with screens. There's a nice fade-out effect to make it visually stand out from other back-actions.

By the way, I can see in the logs that somebody keeps asking for "system status" which is not part of the voice model. What will work is any of:

"summary",
"summarize",
"system summary",
"report",
"system report"

[bruce_miranda]

Why not just add System Status to that list?

[philchillbill]

Why not just add System Status to that list?

[Beth]

If you activate an activity without giving an end-time or duration (because you don't know how long you will be needing it) how do you end the activity before the next scheduled set-point?

[philchillbill]

If you activate an activity without giving an end-time or duration (because you don't know how long you will be needing it) how do you end the activity before the next scheduled set-point?

There's no dedicated command for that. However. if you say "Reset the system mode" then all zones go back to following their schedules. That will also of course include any zones that were already overridden outside of the activity-activation or that were permanently overridden. But it's better than nothing for most cases.