Thrag's Echo Plugin Discussion Thread

[ando1]

use this as a guide


Manual add your device , name it and then put the URLs in the ON and Off buttons .
once done scan your devices again from Echo

Awesome! Thanks so much!

Andy

[hhiiffii]

HA-Bridge

It was a nube question and I figured it out. For some reason my port changed from 8080 to 80

[neuro]

Newbie here.

Can someone explain to me the use of this echo plugin script + HA Bridge that I can't already do with the HS skills

I'm trying to wrap my head around the description, but can't seem to figure out what this plugin can do that other's cant...

[Ltek]

Newbie here.

Can someone explain to me the use of this echo plugin script + HA Bridge that I can't already do with the HS skills

I'm trying to wrap my head around the description, but can't seem to figure out what this plugin can do that other's cant...

I found the info buried...

My script has two main functions. An Alexa Skill similar to the official HS skill and the ability to automatically configure the "HA Bridge" server. You can use either or both of these abilities. You can also use either or both alongside the HS skill, you just need to give my skill a name other than "home seer" if you want to set up both to try them out side by side.

Similar to the HS skill it is an Alexa Skill that allows you to run events, control devices, and query the state of devices. The main difference is that the HS skill goes through myhs and my skill can be set up locally so you don't need to depending on another cloud service. My skill also has various configuration options that the official skill lacks like being able to customize what is said in response to commands, to control whether the echo listens for additional commands after the first one, and the ability to create alises for device and events either through a config file or on the fly while talking to the Echo. Since you set it up as your own developer skill, you have flexibility to customize that name of the skill (e.g. "computer" instead of "homeseer" for that star trek feel) and also add or change the language used to control things.

The HA Bridge software works with Amazon's connected home feature to basically mimic Phillips Hue bulbs. It allow you to turn on and off lights (and groups of lights you can define in the Echo app) by simply saying "Alexa, turn off X", rather than the skill method of having to preface each command like Alexa, tell home seer to turn off X".

The skill setup is a little involved since to have it communicate directly with your homeseer instance rather than go through a cloud service like myhs you need to set up my skill as a developer skill in your account, and set up an https proxy on your local network to allow the Echo to communicate with the skill. It probably take a half hour to an hour to set things up initially.

The HA bridge config setup is in comparison simple. You set up the HA bridge which just take a few minutes, set some ini settings, and hit my script page which automatically loads all your devices into the bridge. Finally you ask Alexa to discover devices and that's the whole setup.

[hotopic]

Script

My script has two main functions. .

Ltek, to what script are you referring? I am very interested in setting up a local ridge between Alexa and home see her. The HS app has terrible latency and more often times than not I'm getting the response that she can't access the homeseer skill. A local connection will take care of all that .

[bigbrorpi]

Has anyone gotten this working with HS4? I'm running into issues with getting the .aspx file to work. Was missing the NewtonSoft DLL, fixed that and now I get an error: error VBNC30248: 'If', 'ElseIf', 'Else', 'End If', 'Const', or 'Region' expected.

This worked far better for me in HS3 than the HS skills, so I'd love to get it working for HS4. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

[jon00]

Does /test.aspx work on your system?

[bigbrorpi]

Thanks for the reply - actually it doesn't. I get the same error. I had to wipe my HS3 box clean to install HS4, so maybe I don't have ASP enabled?

[jon00]

It's a bug with Mono.

Make sure you are on the latest version of Mono, then SSH/WinSCP and navigate to the usr/bin folder. In that folder is the file vbnc. Open vbnc in an editor and change vnbc.exe to vbc.exe