Thrag's Echo Plugin Discussion Thread

[General Patton]

Thrag,

Sent you some beer money!

Great work!

I've been using the Hue emulator on the RPi for a while now and I'll continue to leave that in place but your plugin can take everything to another level.

I sat down last night and got everything setup in an hour and a half. The instructions were great. I already had experience (at work) setting up Apache on a windows box so I was already familiar with that.

We have many IIS (.net aspx) based systems at work and the first person into them in the morning has to wait for things to spin up. That delay is definitely an MS thing.

Thanks again for your work!

Greg

[Thrag]

Thank you. I appreciate the feedback (and beer money).

Development is a bit stalled right now due to the day job, and the fact all I'm doing now is messing around with utterance generation and I expect once Amazon makes it easier to configure custom slots I'll probably be replacing a lot of that code. While it may be wishful thinking, I am also hoping Amazon will soon release some minimal multi-echo/avs support like just passing the name of the device with the request. When that happens I'll jump back into things in earnest to use the device name to provide a location for device commands.

I do have grand plans to make this an actual plug-in, with it's own https listener and the ability to generate it's own self-signed certificate so as to make setup a fifteen rather than a ninety minute ordeal. I have no idea when I might have time to figure that out and implement it all so for right now it's just a dream.

[shrubby]

Love the work too! Enjoy a beer on me..

For some reason, every few days, sometimes daily, it will ask me for a registration code. For example, I'll say, 'Alexa tell the house to run 'good morning' and get a reply of 'registration code incorrect. Listen to...' as my homeseer client is speaking the reg code for me to repeat.

Anyone else experience this?

[collegeboyslive]

Oddly I got this for the 1st time today, I tried to get it to run. A command, and it couldn't find the command, the. Asked for the registration again

[General Patton]

I had this happen when it didn't recognize a device name and somehow it ended up talking about registration.

[Thrag]

Strange, I'll look into it.

Normally the registration prompt should only come up if there's no user and app ID in the config file. If it happens again, before registering again can you check to see if the .ini file has something for the userID? If it's gone, then I'll have to figure out how it gets blanked out. If it's there then the logic for triggering registration probably has a bug.

[General Patton]

I don't think it is getting blanked out though, I never needed to re-register. It just seems like it ends up going down the wrong path....

If it happens again I'll try to capture some more detail.

[General Patton]

I played a little bit and it seems to be launching the ReRegisterIntent a little too easily...

If you try to control a device that doesn't exist like this:

turn on the car

The plugin responds with: "Could not find device car, please say again."

Now if you respond with simply "car" (which someone may easily do in that context) and not "turn on the car", it launches the re-register intent. This is how I first noticed this.

It seems that simple one word requests such as "bus", "car", "television" launch the re register intent.

Attached is a debug log when responding to simply "car"

[Thrag]

I'm thinking somehow it is misinterpreting the command and thinking it is the registration intent.

Remove these lines from the sample utterances:

ReregisterIntent reregister
ReregisterIntent reset registration

They aren't really necessary anyway. I should probably take them out of the generated utterances. They were there really only for testing since it should never be necessary to re-register.

[shrubby]

The others descriptions of the events that lead up to this are spot on with what I'm seeing. I'll remove those lines and let you know. Thanks again for the work and everyone's help!

[dbmet]

Just curious if this will work on a Linux based Homeseer system?

[olag00]

I have been trying to get this to work for about a week now. It seems every day I figured out one more step and now it has stalled because I keep getting the following:

A connection could not be established to Resource [https://my.internal.ip/HS3EchoPlugin.aspx], Type [HTTP]

and Alexa says "I am unable to reach the requested skill".

I finally got apache to run and I can get to your aspx page via the https site.

I created the skill in the amazon development portal and I have all green checks except for the SSL Certificate. I am assuming this is due to it being self signed and not from a trusted source.

I have https radial button marked with https://my.internal.ip/HS3EchoPlugin.aspx

I did see this in the instructions:

Leave the "Https" radio button set and fill in the domain name or external IP address of your server plus /HS3EchoPlugin.aspx.

But i have tried changing all references to my external IP address and still received same error.

I followed the self signed certificate steps from amazon. By the way, one step that kept hanging me up is this in the instructions:

Here's where you'll need that SSL certificate file you generated. You should have a .pem file after running through the steps in the Amazon link above. Copy that file to the name \apache24\conf\server.crt, and copy it again to \apache24\conf\server.key.

This should really say copy the certificate.pem file to \apache24\conf\server.crt and copy the private-key.pem to \apache24\conf\server.key

I kept copying the certificate.pem file for both crt and key.

Also, in the documentation, it is missing "\" at the second ###<###Location###>### tag in the authentication section.

This is the log for when I stop the Apache service, then restart it.

[Sun Nov 08 08:40:30.145675 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 8104:tid 444] AH00422: Parent: Received shutdown signal -- Shutting down the server.
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:32.148717 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 11736:tid 388] AH00364: Child: All worker threads have exited.
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:32.167217 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 8104:tid 444] AH00430: Parent: Child process 11736 exited successfully.
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.716951 2015] [ssl:warn] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH01873: Init: Session Cache is not configured [hint: SSLSessionCache]
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00455: Apache/2.4.17 (Win64) OpenSSL/1.0.2d configured -- resuming normal operations
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00456: Apache Lounge VC14 Server built: Oct 11 2015 11:49:07
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [core:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00094: Command line: 'C:\\Apache24\\bin\\httpd.exe -d C:/Apache24'
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00418: Parent: Created child process 2476
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:45.244965 2015] [ssl:warn] [pid 2476:tid 384] AH01873: Init: Session Cache is not configured [hint: SSLSessionCache]
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:45.247465 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 2476:tid 384] AH00354: Child: Starting 64 worker threads.

Let me know if you need any other information to help troubleshoot.

[The Doge]

Not off to a good start with this. Whenever I download the file it save it as a php file and gives me no options to unzip it. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks
Dan

[heatvent]

I am in about the exact same spot as Olag. I found the missing "/" for location and fixed. I copied certificate.pem to server.key but kept getting errors in the Apache logs about a private key. So I copied private-key.pem to server.key and now Apache loads up fine and I can reach the .aspx page. Now, however, when I tell Alexa to launch home seer she tells me I do not have access to this skill.

I have been trying to get this to work for about a week now. It seems every day I figured out one more step and now it has stalled because I keep getting the following:

A connection could not be established to Resource [https://my.internal.ip/HS3EchoPlugin.aspx], Type [HTTP]

and Alexa says "I am unable to reach the requested skill".

I finally got apache to run and I can get to your aspx page via the https site.

I created the skill in the amazon development portal and I have all green checks except for the SSL Certificate. I am assuming this is due to it being self signed and not from a trusted source.

I have https radial button marked with https://my.internal.ip/HS3EchoPlugin.aspx

I did see this in the instructions:



But i have tried changing all references to my external IP address and still received same error.

I followed the self signed certificate steps from amazon. By the way, one step that kept hanging me up is this in the instructions:



This should really say copy the certificate.pem file to \apache24\conf\server.crt and copy the private-key.pem to \apache24\conf\server.key

I kept copying the certificate.pem file for both crt and key.

Also, in the documentation, it is missing "\" at the second ###<###Location###>### tag in the authentication section.

This is the log for when I stop the Apache service, then restart it.

[Sun Nov 08 08:40:30.145675 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 8104:tid 444] AH00422: Parent: Received shutdown signal -- Shutting down the server.
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:32.148717 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 11736:tid 388] AH00364: Child: All worker threads have exited.
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:32.167217 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 8104:tid 444] AH00430: Parent: Child process 11736 exited successfully.
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.716951 2015] [ssl:warn] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH01873: Init: Session Cache is not configured [hint: SSLSessionCache]
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00455: Apache/2.4.17 (Win64) OpenSSL/1.0.2d configured -- resuming normal operations
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00456: Apache Lounge VC14 Server built: Oct 11 2015 11:49:07
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [core:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00094: Command line: 'C:\\Apache24\\bin\\httpd.exe -d C:/Apache24'
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:44.719451 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 16560:tid 444] AH00418: Parent: Created child process 2476
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:45.244965 2015] [ssl:warn] [pid 2476:tid 384] AH01873: Init: Session Cache is not configured [hint: SSLSessionCache]
[Sun Nov 08 08:40:45.247465 2015] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 2476:tid 384] AH00354: Child: Starting 64 worker threads.

Let me know if you need any other information to help troubleshoot.

[mminehan]

The others descriptions of the events that lead up to this are spot on with what I'm seeing. I'll remove those lines and let you know. Thanks again for the work and everyone's help!

I was having the same problem with Alexa asking to re-register when she gets confused. I removed the lines as suggested and it seems to be much better.

Marty