barrygordon

Jackal, To load the configurator you need to go to www.the-gordons.net and follow the links on the bottom of the main page. You stated: (Harmony Hub note: Do Not enable the Harmony Hub section in the config.ini! That section is no longer needed from ha-bridge 1.2.1 onwards) The Harmony HUB section of the AWS_Config.ini is needed if you want to use the configurator to enter the harmony data. If you are using the HA Bridge to do that then you are correct.

Since all that the rc.local script does with regard to HA Bridge is start the app maybe the RPi has not yet completed its booting although rc.local execution should be the last thing in the boot process. I sort of remember someone recommending a delay in rc.local prior to starting the bridge's. It is somewhere in this thread. Do a thread search for the word sleep and you will see them.

I have not done a forget and re-discover recently, and based upon what you have said I probably won't. When I did it the last time I had to tell the echo to discover devices (without forgetting) several times (4) before they were all recognized. I do not believe the Echo software has changed but it might have. Why don't you drop a line to Brad at BWS systems (support@bwssystems.com) and ask him to give it a try. I am running with HA Bridge 1.2,2 also. R U sure nothing has changed on your network with regard to uPnP and the discovery of such devices? Router? Some New app using port 1900?

According to the Alexa skill documentation you should not have to open the skill to send a command to the skill. The open call is used if your skill wants to provide a nice message or prompt. The basic call is an intent call which has the parameters parsed from the spoken string by the Amazon Alexa cloud processing. I don't think others are having this problem so it sounds like something is wrong with your particular situation. There is also a close call which also has no parameters passed to it but allows you to put out a goodbye message or anything you want. I have written my own private skill and I don't have the problem you allude to. I use the open to just say "This is Sarah, what is it you need me to do". For a basic command I just say "Alexa, tell Sarah to xxxxxxxxx" The xxxxxxxxx string is then parsed based upon the utterances and intents I have defined for my Sarah skill and sent to my skills end point independent of whether I have ever opened it or not. I have been programming for close to 60 years but I am sure that Benoit is more than competent. Give the UDI team time to figure it all out, but feedback is really helpful.

Do the off line devices still work when Alexa is commanded to do something with them? Mine all do.

Looking at the Alexa App under settings connected home. The HUE hub is not listed. Only Insteon, Wink and Smartthings have entries. I suspect that Connected Home devices that require support from some manufacturer specific app in the cloud are the ones listed. The Philips Hue (ergo, the Hue Emulator) does not. When the Echo searches for the "Connected Home" systems it does a uPnP search. It then looks at the description entries that are returned to ascertain which connected home system it is. The Echo appears to also keeps a channel open for unsolicited uPnP messages to which it also responds in the same manner. I have no idea what is required for certification of a connected home system but I suspect Amazon wants to ensure that it has appropriate commands in in its vocabulary (e.g. turn on, turn off, . . .). Perhaps Amazon will even expand that vocabulary if required by a newly certified home connected system. From what I can see Amazon does not seem to care what the friendly name of a device in a connected home system is, but I am sure there are some rules as to how many words etc. For marketing purposes, the more system Amazon can state are compatible with the Echo, the more Echo's it will sell. I don't like the way Apple controls what can be run on an iPad and hope Amazon does not take the same approach.

As you can see the HUE Emulator can handle at least three words in a friendly name. The process that the Amazon cloud uses to handle multiple word names seems quite robust. I did notice one strange thing. Most of my three word names relate to fans which are controlled by an Insteon Fanlinc. I have programs set up for each fan using the word Fan, followed by the room name, followed by any of the speed values (Off, Low, Medium, High, Faster, Slower). The program for faster/slower pulls the current speed and then moves to the next appropriate speed. I have no problem telling Alexa to deal with the fans. The issue is that when I look at the Alexa app connected home devices, the fans are all dimmed and marked off line. However they all work when I request Alexa to set them to a specific speed, go faster or slower or turn off. Does anyone know the reason for them being marked off line. I do not command Alexa to adjust the fans very often in fact rarely if at all, but when I do they work just fine.

Michel, First to clarify things, I did not write the current HUE emulator. That was written by BWS Systems. My contribution was the configuration system which acts as the link between the HUE Emulator and the ISY. The actual Philips HUE Bridge/Hub was certified by Amazon for the connected home. The Configuration system is written in Visual Basic 6 and could be easily converted to vb.Net or any other language, or directly incorporated into the HUE Bridge. After all it is only code. My home has a non-permanent IP address assigned by my ISP. I use a DYNDNS service to keep my domain (I have a web server) publicly available to the WEB but I am not sure that is required in the use of an Echo. No where does Amazon stipulate that to use an Echo you must have a permanent fixed IP address. The Echo when it starts, connects to the Amazon cloud and I have no knowledge how it does that nor do I care. What I believe is key is that the "Connected Home" devices e.g. the WEMO system the Wink system, the Insteon hub must all handle uPnP and reside on the same LAN segment as the Echo. Interestingly enough the Philips HUE Hub is not listed in the Alexa app as a "Connected Home" device. It used to be. The Echo does a uPnP discovery search when it starts and I have been told repeats that search periodically to find new "Connected Home" devices. When the Echo is requested to "Discover Devices" via the Alexa app, it does a uPnP search and then based upon what it gets back, requests a discovery of the devices controlled by that "Connected Home" device (individual items such as lights, switches, etc), once again using the uPnP/SOAP protocol. From what I understand a "Connected Home" device e.g. the Phillips HUE or its emulator, never communicates with the Amazon cloud, only the Echo does; and only to send the spoken "Speech" and receive back the information parsed from that speech as text in a JSON format for the "Connected Home" device to process. The Hue Emulator was never certified by Amazon and Amazon does not "formally" know it exists, but it does work quite well. I do not see why you could not package into the ISY the same code (in a language of your choosing) as exists in the HUE Bridge emulator which is written in Java. I do not know if that would need to be certified or if it would be a violation of some legal tenet. If one were to take an RPi running the HUE bridge emulation and slap a label on it that said "ISY Connected Home HUB" . . . Essentially that is what HomeSeer did for their latest incarnation of the HomeSeer controller. I wager that a significant portion of the ISY user community basically wants control of lights and that would be reasonably handled by the existing "Connected Home" device commands of Turn On; Turn Off; Set; and Dim. All other things done by an ISY and are not well adapted to those simple commands could be handled by an Alexa skill.

HuddaDudda, I am pretty sure multiple emulators will work on Windows the same way they work on the RPi. Just start several of them during windows startup, each with a different port number, response port number, database name and log file name. Why not get an RPi? About $40 gets you all the hardware you need and all the software is free. The long thread in this forum (the one that about 50+ pages) has enough information to do it all. Just requires a bit of time to read it all.

Michel, mwester, I suggest you might want to take a serious look at the current version of the Hue Emulator (BWS Systems HA Bridge) and my Configuration program (AWS_Config). I believe it does just about all of the things you are looking for. The Configuration program acts as the link between the ISY and the Emulator, as the emulator in its raw form knows nothing about the ISY except its address. The Configuration program acts as follows: 1) Reads the ISY to get all the information about Devices, Scenes, and Programs including the Notes/spoken fields for devices and scenes. 2) Provides a windows style drag and drop capability to select the nodes (devices, scene, programs) that is to be edited and then sent to the emulator as part of its (emulator) data base. 3) For each selected item it allows for the Spoken Field or the Device Name to be used to populate what I called the "Friendly Name". The friendly name is what is provided to the Echo for speech recognition purposes and may be edited to whatever the user desires. During the setup for the configuration system (a windows style ini file) the user can specify if the default friendly name is the spoken field or the device name. 4) It provides two default URLs (one for On, one for Off, with Dim capability in the On URL) for the Emulator to send to the ISY when this friendly name is recognized. It uses the Restful interface for all ISY communications properly setting up the User-id and password for authentication. Either of these URL's may be edited prior to sending them to the emulator. 5) It allows for the Dim command for lights or the Set command for thermostats by having the emulator capture the number that is spoken in a DIM command or a SET command. It allows for the presence of a math formula to be included and executed by the emulator when the command is recognized. This formula is written as a function of "X" Where x is the number spoken. This allows for the case where a thermostat works in whole degrees or half degrees. It also allows for the spoken range to be 0-100 or 0-255 and the formula to do any necessary conversions. 6) It allows for the entry of a custom device where all the Emulator information (Friendly name and two URL's) are entered by the user. I use this to control my HA components that are not under ISY control (my Home theater under PC control, My pool under the control of an Autelis pool controller). It should be able to control a Global Cache system for the sending of IR commands under voice control, although I have not tried that yet. In my home all IR work is under the control of a PC connected to a Global Cache system to allow for much shorter messages to be sent (Component name, IR command Name). 7) The entries on the Emulator can be edited at any time if things change. I have been using this system for several months (development period) it is now quite stable and fairly popular among the ISY community. I have been using the same ISY configuration for at least a good month now. Not of interest to the majority of the ISY community, it will also handle a Harmony Hub in the same manner as it handles the ISY populating the emulator as required.

Huddadudda, I have no personal experience running the emulator on a WIN 7 box but I suspect it is the same as running it on a Raspberry Pi which most of us who are using the emulator do. The Emulator is a Java Jar so operation should be identical on all Java systems. My RPi runs four copies of the emulator, three of them having devices defined only for the ISY and the fourth, my test instance, has devices not located on my ISY (SPA, Theater, Waterfall, Pool Lights, Thermostat). I have a grand total of 93 devices defined across the four emulators. One has 35 devices, one has 32 devices, one has 21 devices, and one has 5 devices. With regard to the ISY, My devices are mostly On/Off/Dim controls; but I also handle fans (all 3 speeds plus off), scenes, and programs (runThen). I have been told you can ask a scene to dim/brighten but not to set an absolute intensity leveI. I have not tried that I know of no absolute limitation on the device count but have been told that the Echo has trouble finding all the device on an emulator if the count is greater than 40 or so. The test instance has debugging turned on so I can see what happens when I speak and what gets sent to the emulator, and what the emulator sends to the final destination e.g. the ISY. I have almost no trouble with the Echo interpreting what I say. The only thing I don't like is the amount of time before the Echo says Okay signifying completion of the command sequence. When I speak a command destined for the ISY I see the result, e.g. a light turning on, in less than a second after I complete speaking. It then takes 2-3 seconds additional for the Okay to be spoken by the Echo. I believe the Echo will respond with Okay when it gets a status of 200 (OK) coming back from the ISY signifying command completion. That should happen very quickly so I do not understand the delay. If anyone understands why this delay occurs I would like to hear from them. Some individuals have reported problems with the Echo finding the devices on the emulators when you command the echo to "Discover Devices". In almost all cases I know about this has been resolved to be a uPnP issue on the LAN sub-net the Echo and Emulators are on. as the Echo uses a uPnP search to discover devices in the Connected Home. In my case I have to repeat the "Discover Devices" sequence multiple times (generally 3 or 4) for the Echo to find all of my devices. On each discovery pass it appears to find the devices on one or two of the emulators. I did run a test with all 93 of my devices on a single emulator, but the Echo could never find them no matter how many times I tried. I believe the author of the Emulator (BWS Systems) is looking into the device discovery problem. Hope that helps

Icerabbit, The connected home that They are working on will not require the "Tell Izzy" I am doing all that you want including turning on my pool spa, waterfall or lights using the HUE emulator in a Connected Home scenario. My pool system is not controlled by the ISY but that is not an issue. It could just as easily have been controlled by the ISY.

I do not believe the portal is necessary if you want to create your own skill. The Amazon cloud will send the slot information that it has decoded from the speech it was sent by the Echo to an endpoint you define. You can host the skill's endpoint on your LAN as long as you have a certificate and can handle SSL (I use sTunnel on an RPi to handle the SSL issues and the certificate). Your endpoint can then deal with the ISY using the ISY restful interface. The Skill endpoint could even subscribe to ISY events and know at all times what the status of every device in the ISY configuration is. I have a basic skill named "Sarah" running on a LAN local endpoint and was going to start developing the necessary utterances and endpoints, but based on the difficulty the UDI team seems to be having with all the links in the process chain I am going to stay with my Connected Home and the HA Bridge (HUE emulator) for now. One thing I believe is that Alexa gets "Smarter" as she hears the same phrases over and over. For example the Echo rarely misses "Kitchen Lights", "Master Bedroom Lights" and other devices which I command often. Things I command less e.g. "Guest bedroom Lights" have a lower recognition rate until I take the time to speak them multiple times. I am not sure how this happens but I believe it is so although I have run no definitive test. The Echo seems to have no issue with multiple words as the friendly name e.g. "Office Fan Medium" in the connected home scenario. Also there seems to be reasonable flexibility in phrasing the command (turn on, turn off, shut, shut off . . . with or without a "the" before the device name. One of my biggest problems is I forget the names of the 90+ devices I have setup in the HA Bridge. By convention I have lights always as "<room name> Lights" not "<room name> Light". Lamps are always referred to in the singular e.g "Barrys Lamp" or "Guest Bedroom Lamp". I use the suffix "Area" as in Kitchen Area" to designate a scene that handles multiple devices. Works well for me with my aging memory. Benoit has already indicated that I should expect the same level of performance when the UDI ISY Connected Home is certified and released. Barry

This thread is showing 0 views in the "How are You Using the ISY" forum because it has been moved to the "Common ISY Topics Forum / Amazon Echo". There it shows over 60,000 views!

Micheal Buble is a Canadian singer who is very popular in the USA. He sounds very much like Frank Sinatra, assuming you know who that is.

Benoit, Yes you are correct a scene does not have a state, only the devices therein have states. IIRC that is why a scene can't be dimmed. My statement about comma and period in text representing speech is just a comment. The same is true when reading text aloud to a group. Barry P.S. your presence on the forums is greatly appreciated, as is Michel's. too many forums, other than UDI, do not have a visible presence from their developers / decision makers.

Benoit, With regard to your Question on the HUE bridge and the "emulator" The original version of the emulation of the HUE bridge (page 1 of the very long thread on this forum) has been greatly enhanced over time with the newer version discussed starting at about page 16 The newer version of the emulator is now called "HA Bridge" and was developed by BWS Systems (bwssystems.com). The latest version (1.2.2) now can send commands to the "Mi Casa" system by Vera, The ISY system by UDI (the one we all know and love), and to the Logitech Harmony Hub. It runs on any JAVA machine and has been loaded onto RPi's by many people since, like the Real HUE hub and the ISY, it must be on 24/7. About $40 buys you a fully capable RPi-2 with all the software you need free off the Internet. My contribution was the configuration system (AWS_Config.exe) which runs on a Windows system. It queries The ISY for its full configuration (devices, scenes, programs) and provides a drag and drop interface to populate the HA Bridge with the data need to control the item (Device, Scene, program) on the ISY. It allows the selection of the Device name or the notes/spoken field of a device or scene, or any desired friendly name to be used for what is spoken by the Echo user to Alexa. The HA Bridge did not know about the ISY. he Configurator is only needed when you want to add/delete/update the ISY devices on the HA Bridge. The article at the makers site is very informative regarding the principles behind an Amazon Connected device. The Philips HUE hub was chosen for emulation because the Echo/HUE api was available. Hope that helps explain what many are talking about.

Benoit, Based upon your statement re the "Connected Defice" capability for the ISY; then perhaps the skill should concentrate on handling things that are not simple On/Off/Dim. This covers things like thermostats (all of the Climate options), Things that one would address with Open/Close (e.g. locks and doors). I would also like the skill to be able to report the state of any ISY device With "Alexa, ask IZZY the state of <device/Scene/Program name>, or if must be: "Alexa, ask Izzy to Tell me the state of . . . " In text representing speech, the comma signifies a short pause and the period a long one. I also agree that in the "Connected Home" a request should be able to end with "and . . ." or "and then . . .". I have requested this of Amazon a while back, but it is not on their priority list. I also requested they make Blue Tooth two way so external Bluetooth speakers would work, and implement the Bluetooth AVRCP protocol to control other Bluetooth based A/V system that act as an AVRCP client. All of these requests should not require a hardware change.

LOL, But Alexa does know who Michael Buble ( with an accent over the e) is when I say "Alexa, Play music by Michael Buble" pronouncing Buble as Bublay

I get a chuckle when I read these posts. Amazon assigned the Echo (a physical device) a name (Alexa) which happens to be, in most countries associated, with the female gender. In the posts the Echo has been anthromorphised into a female person and is referred to as such. Makes me think of Margaret Mead. Alexa skills are non-trivial to develop, and I have great respect/empathy for Benoit. He has kept his cool dealing with all the people in the this forum. Many of us are using the HUE emulator as most of our needs are Dim/On/Off. I don't change a thermostat setting often, maybe twice a year. Since the HUE is a "connected Device" the majority of the problems most are having with the Alexa skill disappear. I use Turn On; Turn On The; Turn Off; Turn Off The; Shut; Shut Off; Shut Off The; Set <device name> to XX; Set <device name> to XX percent; Set The <device name> to XX; Set The <device name> to XX percent; To handle multiple lights, I define a scene and give it a name ending in Area. Ergo for all my lights in the kitchen (ceiling lights, laundry room lights, Peninsula lights, Counter Lights) I can say Shut The Kitchen Area. For fans I use programs triggered from Alexa by: Turn on the <room> fan Low, Turn on the <room> fan Medium, Turn on the <room> fan High, Turn off the <room> fan, Using the HA Bridge (the Hue Emulator) I can set up any URL and command to be sent (one for On and one for Off for each device name) to any device on my LAN. That is how I control my Theater which is actually controlled by a PC. I get about 95% accuracy for speech recognition as my Echo is located in a room that has a large space (about 1600 sq ft with 12 foot ceilings) with hard surfaces so it has a high reverb factor (Plaster walls and marble floors). I am playing with mounting the Echo on the ceiling. Hopefully once the ISY is certified as a connected device I hope it will at least have the same capability as the HUE.

I agree with your assessment that it is a network issue. I know nothing about your network equipment. Can you simplify your network (for testing) to the simplest configuration possible, first eliminating your firewall and then the domain controller. Could you send me (email) a sketch of your network schematic showing what is connected to what including IP addresses and port numbers in use. I do not understand why you use a Domain Controller on a simple home network unless your network is being used a lot more extensively than just for a simple home/home-office Most networks I see have a cable modem or some similar device connecting to their ISP, then a router then perhaps a switch. The router acts as the firewall, and most of them provide a 4 port switch integral to the router and handle wi-fi or have wireless adapters (WAPs) connected to the switch Let me describe my home network. The configuration is ISP->CableModem->Router->24 port switch->host devices or secondary switches. The network runs at Gigabit speed, The router is by Mikrotik and has an integral 4 port switch of which I use two ports. One port goes to a VoiP phone adapter (vonage) and one port goes to the 24 port switch. The router does all the fire-walling between the LAN and the WAN (Internet). The LAN side has no firewalls and is completely open communications wise. The LAN is a single sub-net (192.168.1.xx). The router handles DHCP and provides for reservations giving the net effect of static IP's. There are three WAP's in the house all ceiling mounted running using POE. There are three secondary switches each connected to a main switch port. The secondary switch are all 16 port units. One in the Theater, One in the Server room, one in my Office. The reason for the secondary switches is because at those locations there are lots of devices (hosts) but when I built my home I only ran a single Ethernet cable to each location. The only port open to the external world is 80 which is for my web server. No other port will answer a ping nor will they accept unsolicited traffic, i.e. traffic a host on the LAN did not request. The LAN is setup to allow uPnP. Protocols in use on the LAN are TCP/UDP at the bottom level; and above them things like http, https, uPnP SMB, SOAP. All switches are un-managed. All network equipment is UPS protected and the house has a backup standby generator which cuts in after a 20 second loss of utility power. Ergo power outages are not an issue.

In the utterance list you provided I notice a line stating shut off and one stating shut off {device}. Depending on how Amazon does the match of speech against utterance list item,: 1) shortest match 2) first match 3) Longest match That might explain some abnormal behaviors depending on the way the utterance list is organized.

I wonder if the skill has accounted for the fact that Insteon thermostats are set in 1/2 degree increments while zwave thermostats are set in whole degree increments.

If The administrators set it up I will be willing to moderate it. They would need to move all of the posts regarding that subject to the new thread from the old one, or give me the where withall to do so

I suspect that the ISY team is working diligently to improve the IZZY skill and as they make changes the way the Echo/ISY responds will change. I am not sure what their development cycle is and if they can just make chanegs to the skill without re-certification, but if the way the system is responding differetnly implies things are changing. It can also be Amazon improving the speech recognition. As I understand it Amazon cloud code handles all speech from the Echo. It then uses the utterance file and intents of the desiganted skill (IZZY) to parse the speech and fill "Slots" with the result of the parse. The slots are then passed to the skills endpoint (in the cloud or on a LAN somewhere) to be processed. This chain is not trivial and there are many places for things to go badly. I have developed my own private skill as some others have done so I know the construction of the processing chain fairly well. My skill's endpoint is on my LAN with an RPi handling the SSL issues and tunneling them to the endpoint which then allows me to write the code for "Clear" data. Since this is a test skill I do not require certification. At this time I mainly use the HUE emulator under the connected home and am able to control all my lights and on/off devices (e.g. a water circulator controlled by a micro module) and my fans (using a fanlinc). My accuracy rate is over 90% so I am fairly complacent.