Trying to have Alexa say value of a variable

[Guy Lavoie]

So close... I'm trying to have Alexa say the value of a variable. The closest I can get is to ask the percentage of the device (if I define it as a device set/lower/raise), which is awkward with you're not looking for percentages, such as a light level, temperature, etc. I tried words like "level", "setting", etc.

Any magic way to get this working more intuitively and better?

Edited August 25 by Guy Lavoie

[larryllix]

5 hours ago, Guy Lavoie said:

So close... I'm trying to have Alexa say the value of a variable. The closest I can get is to ask the percentage of the device (if I define it as a device set/lower/raise), which is awkward with you're not looking for percentages, such as a light level, temperature, etc. I tried words like "level", "setting", etc.

Any magic way to get this working more intuitively and better?

The only way I could see working is to have ISY break the value down into Low, Medium, High, very High, Extreme, and create a variable for each and a routine to say the phrases for each.

On that same technique multiple phrases and variables could be created for absolute temperature values but break them into larger lumps using the phrases with "greater than" inserted.
eg:
"Your temperature is greater than 72 degrees"
"Your temperature is less than 68 degrees"

It would take a few, of course but some careful thought of what ranges are critical can reduce the quantities a lot.

[Guy Lavoie]

Well, that might be a usable workaround, if there is no other way. I'll just have to think about that. This is for the pool water temperature, which is a rather limited range of temperature values during the summer season when I want to know it. 

Here is the full story: I'm still new to the EISY world (just a few weeks) and I'm enjoying trying everything out. I have Venstar Colortouch thermostats, three of them in fact. One controls my HVAC, another one controls a blower to send heated air into my furnace return when my wood stove is hot enough, and the third one uses an external sensor that I sealed into a tube to measure the pool water temperature. Now Venstar has a nice phone app, online portal (much like UD) and an Alexa skill, and it all works great, but there is an annoying bug... The optional external temperature can be configured in various ways: to display the outside temperature (and use it in some control parameters, such as lock out the heat pump below certain temperatures), as an alternate control source for the thermostat, as an air return temperature reading, etc. The annoying bug is that when you ask Alexa for the current temperature, it always tells you the temperature of the thermostat's internal sensor, even if you configure the thermostat to use the external sensor instead for control, which ignores the internal sensor in that configuration. This is how my pool water temperature one is set up. So the thermostat's screen shows the correct water temperature, but Alexa gives me the useless internal sensor instead. I even reported the bug to Venstar in April, and they acknowledged it. But no fix in sight.

Fast forward to today, where I'm trying out the Venstar plugin. Good news: it extracts both the internal and external temperature sensor readings, and sets them both to distinct variables. Now if I can just get Alexa to say the variable...