EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

Thanks Steve, but I don't have a link for that.

Thanks Marty. Right now if I Google "Evohome Alexa" then the first Automated Home hit is on the 2nd page of the search results. As we know, nobody ever looks past the first few entries on the first page .

Googling "EvoControl Alexa" returns the Automated Home thread as the 6th item on the first page, which is better. But then you'd have to know EvoControl existed to search for it specifically.

Interestingly, the Domoticz forum is the 1st hit I see. I wonder why their SEO seems better than Automated Home's?

That's really interesting. When I Google it, I see Domoticz 2nd to Amazon with Automated Home 4th, but everyone will be served a different set of results based on a variety of different factors. But your point is correct that the Domoticz forum ranks above this forum despite not having nearly as much "substance" to it.

Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about that because they seem to have a more powerful domain and that's a major factor in determining Google rankings.

But you're also right that people need to know that EvoControl exists to search for that specifically, so I was kind of thinking about putting a little banner somewhere on the homepage of the website (not the forum, the actual automatedhome.com site itself) so that if someone scolls down the page they might see it and think "Oh wow, what's this? Oh I need this, let me check it out."

Like I said, it's not likely to help many people discover you, but it might send a few people your way.

Just an idea.

Sure, let's give it a try! Let me know if you need any text/images to do it or if you have enough to go on from the forum or from the EvoControl site.

I'll send you an email

Amazon has a new widget-related firmware bug. Today I noticed that launching the widget showed stale data which could not possibly reflect the current state of my Evohome system. I checked the logs and saw no incoming event meaning the Echo was not sending the widget-launch event to my back-end to refresh the datastore. The only way I could fix this was by removing the widget and re-installing it.

I have no idea how widespread this bug is or how often it triggers but if you see stale data on your widget then be aware that I won't see anything in the logs and you'll just have to fix locally on your Echo. Sigh.

Hi, had a quick look but didn't see this.
Since the clocks changed my Evo Control is setting the end time an hour later then it should. If I ask it to set a temperature for 1 hour, it gives a finish time an hour later, so I am guessing a clock somewhere is out.
The time on my EvoHome controller is correct. Domoticz also shows the correct time. Any idea what it could be?

Well that Amazon bug is pretty sporadic so you won't see it every time.

Your 0-minute UTC offset is now corrected. Resideo stores it in your TCC account but rather than poll TCC for it every time somebody launches the skill/widget I cache the value. On the first launch after the DST change I poll TCC once to update your offset. You launched the skill 4 mins after the DST changeover last week but Resideo apparently hadn't yet updated things on their side meaning I grabbed a stale 60-min value for you and cached that.

smartskills.tech and all subdomains are offline and it won't be fixed before tomorrow Thurs 7th for sure. This does not affect linked/running users but makes it impossible to accept new users. It transpires that the migration to a new hosting package that was supposed to take place approx 2 years ago was botched - they opened the new package but left the old one running/live. Now suddenly the old one was killed off but they didn't move the domain pointer to the new one. Sigh.

Ok, it's all live again and quite a bit faster too

As I reasonably long time user, I can't believe I don't know this... But here goes.

I asked Alexa to activate a schedule UNTIL 5pm but she heard it as AT 5pm...

How do I cancel a shedule which is either active? or in the future?


Also.. I have to ask.. Whats the current situation with the "charging model".. Every year I expect to find that I have to sign up, but EvoControl keeps on working.....

You don't 'cancel' a schedule, you replace it with something else. You could have said 'undo' as the very first thing after making the mistake, but it's too late now. So you have to re-upload whatever saved schedule was active in the zone (usually 'A') by saying "upload schedule A everywhere". If any zones were not on a saved schedule then you'll lose those changes as 'A' will replace things. So an alternative is to open the schedule editor for each of the affected zones and just delete the switchpoints at 5PM. Did you recently download a backup of your skill config from the cloud because restoring that will put back all your schedules.

I still haven;t implemented the charging model because dealing with VAT from all over Europe would be a pain to do myself. So i'm looking at using a billing service to act as a 'merchant of reference' so I would not be the seller as such, just the 'manufacturer'. It may actually happen this season