Amazon Echo and ISY

[MikeB]

 

 

 There are certain key words you can't really have in device names, otherwise echo will interpret them as a non-connected-home command.  I've found that "music" and "alarm" are two.

 

Thanks, will try changing that.  I will say it is working for my other commands and distinguishes fine between, for example:

 

Kitchen Music

Kitchen Lights

 

Will report back.

[Fatty]

Just set up using the hue hack. Works very well, thank you guys for all of your work. Now for the question. Is there a reason not to run the emulator on s PC? Seems like folks here are using a raspberry.

[btreinders]

Anyone having issues with the Echo detecting certain commands?

 

For example, I have the Hue Emulator configured for a command called "Goodnight Music".  If I say "Alexa, Turn On Goodnight Music" it says it can't find the answer to my question.  If I check the history it is hearing my speech properly but is obviously confused.  

 

If I swap the command around and say"Alexa, Turn Goodnight Music On" it works fine.  However, I find other commands will not work that way.  For example "Alexa, Turn Goodnight Music Off" may not work while "Alexa, Turn Off Goodnight Music" might.

 

Anyone?

 

I have found that for the garage door Alexa will recognize "open garage door"  or open any device as on but "close garage door" results in her adding close garage door to my to do list.  Close any other device that I have works as off.

[btreinders]

Just set up using the hue hack. Works very well, thank you guys for all of your work. Now for the question. Is there a reason not to run the emulator on s PC? Seems like folks here are using a raspberry.

Other than the electric bill, no.  If you already have a PC running 24/7 then no other reason at all.

[fryfrog]

Other than the electric bill, no.  If you already have a PC running 24/7 then no other reason at all.

 

That rarely reboots, doesn't ever have issues and is generally very reliable. Otherwise, something like a Pi 2 is great because it is cheap and extremely reliable, set it up right and worst case you pull and re-apply power to get it back up. You can tuck it away next to your ISY and pretty much forget about it. Maybe even use it w/ the 5.0 firmware. If you're not familiar with Linux, it might not be a great choice though. I believe they'll run Windows 10, but don't know anything about that.

[MikeB]

 Other than the electric bill, no.  If you already have a PC running 24/7 then no other reason at all.

 

Right.  I have a server that is running 24/7 anyway (basic file sharing, media server, photo storage, wholehouse audio control, workstation backups, etc.) so I don't mind adding the Hue emulator to it.  Others wit no dedicated server might prefer to use a Pi.

[MikeB]

Changing the command to "Goodnight Sonos" seems to work much better.  Thanks for the suggestion.

[bgrubb1]

I have been playing with this all weekend

I have it all working using a win8.1 pc and the mapper  works great

I would prefer it to run on a RPI

I have the RPI up and running the emulator and have used the configurator.html to add devices that work to the RPI

If I reboot the RPI and look in configurator.html - it shows my devices

when I delete devices and tell the echo to look for them , it does not find any from the RPI

It does find them from the PC and I have turned off the PC, so it shouldn't be a port problem

Anyone have an idea to try ??

Thanks in advance

...Barry

[mark-vo]

I have been playing with this all weekend

I have it all working using a win8.1 pc and the mapper  works great

I would prefer it to run on a RPI

I have the RPI up and running the emulator and have used the configurator.html to add devices that work to the RPI

If I reboot the RPI and look in configurator.html - it shows my devices

when I delete devices and tell the echo to look for them , it does not find any from the RPI

It does find them from the PC and I have turned off the PC, so it shouldn't be a port problem

Anyone have an idea to try ??

Thanks in advance

...Barry

 

Sounds just like my weekend!

 

I've had the emulator running on a Win8 tablet since I got the Echo last week and decided yesterday to resurrect an old RPi I had lying around to see how it would fare. Besides being much slower than the Win8 (the emulator takes well over 8 minutes to load), configurator.html is somewhat hit-or-miss. I had to reboot the Echo twice before it would find the devices and they often appear "OFFLINE" in the Echo app even though they usually respond to commands. I have the RPi wired to my router while the Win8 machine is on WiFi, which could be part of the problem.

 

For now it's working on the old RPi but I've ordered an RPi2 to try out.

 

One other issue I found with mapper00007.exe is that custom ON/OFF URLs have to be manually "re-edited" before they stick.

[bgrubb1]

I played with this all weekend and could not get discovery to work with a RPI2

It would run, but never discover (or get discovery requests from the echo)

Would run fine from a win8.1 machine

Tonight, I switched the RPI2 from wired to wireless (I am a big fan of using wired whenever I can)

works great on the RPI2 wireless

I even changed the address reservation on my router of 192.168.1.204 to the wireless instead of the wired - still works great

So apparently there is a flaky problem with the RPI2 Ethernet stack

In reading forums here, vera, etc, some say it works wired, some say it only works wireless

has anyone seen this issue, or better yet, found a solution ??

Also  maybe this can help others trying to make it work

...Barry

 

[Scott847]

Amazon is having a ginormous sale for Prime members on July 15. I am hoping they lower the price of the Echo for that day so I can pick up another one for the bedroom. Then I'd have the kitchen Echo controlling the upstairs lights and the bedroom echo controlling the downstairs lights, with remotes in the living room and the office. That would be perfect, though I prefer not to spend another $180 to make it happen.

 

Amazon Prime Day

It's on sale now for $129.99, $50 off the normal $179.99 price.

[Scott847]

It's on sale now for $129.99, $50 off the normal $179.99 price.

Oops, already all gone at that price...

[mark-vo]

I played with this all weekend and could not get discovery to work with a RPI2

It would run, but never discover (or get discovery requests from the echo)

Would run fine from a win8.1 machine

Tonight, I switched the RPI2 from wired to wireless (I am a big fan of using wired whenever I can)

works great on the RPI2 wireless

I even changed the address reservation on my router of 192.168.1.204 to the wireless instead of the wired - still works great

So apparently there is a flaky problem with the RPI2 Ethernet stack

In reading forums here, vera, etc, some say it works wired, some say it only works wireless

has anyone seen this issue, or better yet, found a solution ??

Also  maybe this can help others trying to make it work

...Barry

 

Barry,

 

I received the RPi2 yesterday and got it working with both wired and wireless connections.

 

However, it took some fiddling to get everything working and I ended up having to copy the "data" folder (which contains all the device data) from my Win8 laptop to the RPi2 since configurator.html kept corrupting the files. Most of the device data is nested in the "data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/device/0/index" folder and some or all of the entries would get killed every time I started up configurator.html on the RPi which in turn caused the Echo to fail discovery.

 

FYI, I did notice that response is a bit slower with a wireless connection, but it's barely noticeable.

[Goose66]

So the setup for Wink is different from Hue or Wemo. It is setup as a "Hub Service." You install the device on the same LAN and then user the Device Links under Connected Home in the Echo App to link it with the third-party hub service. I know Michael said they looked at all of the APIs, but I wonder if this form of connection to "third-part hub service" will be opened up to other manufacturers? This is precisely what is needed for the ISY.

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi kingwr,

 

Yes, we have. The main issue is that we have not been given any APIs/documentation on:

1. How to register a service with credentials (for ISY)

2. How to tie an Echo user to the service in #1

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[jruben4]

I tried the hue emulator on both a Pi1 and Pi2 - both seemed "sluggish" to respond, and often didn't respond at all (echo would report device not found).  Much more reliable and fast on a PC.

[mark-vo]

I tried the hue emulator on both a Pi1 and Pi2 - both seemed "sluggish" to respond, and often didn't respond at all (echo would report device not found).  Much more reliable and fast on a PC.

 

So far the RPi2 is working very well for me (similar to when I had the emulator running on a PC).

 

How slow is "sluggish"? With the RPi2, the light consistently goes ON or OFF exactly 1.5 seconds after I finish speaking (i.e.- "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights"). Note that it can take up to 3-4 seconds for the first command after asking Alexa to rediscover devices, but I only need to do that when making changes or additions to the device list.

[MustangChris04]

Has anybody had any issues with their devices showing as offline in the Echo app? All my devices were initially discovered successfully, and they all work fine, but they are showing as offline. Any future devices that I add and try to discover do not get discovered. 

 

In the cmd console, I see that there are upnp discovery requests from the IP address of my Echo when I try to discover the devices. 

[bgrubb1]

Several people have had issues (Myself included) where the  device database on the emulator gets corrupted. In one case I deleted everything and started over and in another, the database was gone.

 

Enhancement request for the mapper - Could their be a button too make a local backup copy of the database and a way to write it back ??

[mark-vo]

Has anybody had any issues with their devices showing as offline in the Echo app? All my devices were initially discovered successfully, and they all work fine, but they are showing as offline. Any future devices that I add and try to discover do not get discovered. 

I had this happen when I was initially testing the RPi...all the devices would appear as "offline" in the Echo app, but they worked and would individually reappear when I asked Alexa to turn them on. 

 

If the Echo can't find anything during discovery, try rebooting it (unplug the adapter for a few seconds). 

[madmartian]

Has anybody had any issues with their devices showing as offline in the Echo app? All my devices were initially discovered successfully, and they all work fine, but they are showing as offline. Any future devices that I add and try to discover do not get discovered. 

 

In the cmd console, I see that there are upnp discovery requests from the IP address of my Echo when I try to discover the devices. 

 

I would first try exiting and rerunning the hue emulator. Then ask Alexa to discover again. If that doesn't fix it I would try forgetting and re-adding the devices in Echo settings on your smartphone. The only time I have had a problem is when I moved the folder I am storing everything in. I have to forget/re-add (in Echo settings) when I do that or it leaves all the offline modules and adds everything again as new modules. Otherwise I have had no issues with the emulator. The module data is stored in the "data" folder, so you should not have to do anything through the mapper just to get it working again. In fact you should be able to move it all to another computer without using the mapper just by copying the folder containing the data folder + rest program + hue emulator + batch file and adding the batch file to the startup. Just make sure you have removed it from the old folder/computer so you don't have it running twice. You will need to update the batch file to reflect the new location.

 

Note also that it is possible for something else running on your computer to hijack one of the 3 ports the hue emulator uses, which would also cause the described symptom. In that case you would need to reboot the computer.

[MustangChris04]

I tried restarting the emulator, the server, the echo, deleting the devices from the echo app, even running the emulator on a different computer, all without success. I deleted the data folder and started to add the devices over again. A new data folder was created and the echo found the devices. 

 

Something is causing the database to be corrupt, as bgrubb1 mentioned. I'll have to re-create all my devices again. 

 

 

 

EDIT: After recreating all my devices, I had the same issue. I came to realize that as soon as I add my 22nd device, that none of the devices are discoverable. I guess I'll have to keep it at 21 devices right now.  

[sagig]

Hi Michel,

Take a look at this link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HomeAutomationGuru/~3/npjfW0k_7yI/

 

This may give you a some direction on how to get access to the API etc.

He is using the "ASK" service to easily integrate Echo with his home automation system.

 

Sagi

 

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi Sagi,

 

Thanks so very much. I just sent an email.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[randyth]

Hi Michel,

Take a look at this link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HomeAutomationGuru/~3/npjfW0k_7yI/

 

This may give you a some direction on how to get access to the API etc.

He is using the "ASK" service to easily integrate Echo with his home automation system.

 

Sagi

 

I don't think that guy is doing anything very different than what kgividen and I have already done with our Amazon Echo apps.  They operate the same in that I issue commands such as "Alexa, tell Sarah to turn on kitchen light."  The trick is making the app work for anyone.

 

I suspect this guy's Echo app is hard coded to talk to his personal system, which he calls IntelliHome.  Similarly, my app is hard coded to talk to my system via UDI's beta ISYPortal.  The trick is making the app work for anyone, so unless he has a clever way for any random user to point his or her Echo device to their personal "IntelliHome" website or ISYPortal, each user has to have a custom app built for them.

 

I could be wrong, of course, and there could be more magic behind the curtains that I can't see from just looking at his video.

 

-Randy