Alexa Smart Home Skill V3 is now live!

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29

Exactly the same for me… asked to discover many times, restarted openHAB, rebooted raspberry ,
tried removing the skill and re-authorizing it.
No way to get skill v3 working…
Language and county : Italian /Italy

30

Thanks. I see the issue. I just increased the logging. Can you please give it another try so I can see what is happening with your request?

31

Asked again Wed Aug 14 18:30:05 EDT 2019

32

I think i see the discovery request terminate with this message:
Task timed out after 10.01 seconds

I wonder how long it is taking for the item request to openhab to complete. @omatzyo how many items does your system have (generally) ? Less than 100? Or is it very large?

33

I have 2 systems at different houses… One has 121 devices, the other has 78. The larger one runs on a xeon server and has plenty of resources - that’s the one we’re looking at now. Both systems exhibit the same behavior.

EDIT: To be clear less than 100 of those are coming from the openhab skill… there are some wemos, hue lights, nest cams, etc on the network that also show up during discovery.

34

This is what I am seeing as well. It could be either one of these calls that is taking longer than expected. On a side note, we should probably enforce a shorter timeout window on these requests.

https://myopenhab.org/rest/items?metadata=alexa,channel,synonyms&recursive=true (please see below)
https://myopenhab.org/rest/services/org.eclipse.smarthome.core.i18nprovider/config

@omatzyo can you try to access the URLs above via your browser after initially logging successfully to your myopenhab account and let us know if you noticed a delay in response?

@ftarquini just for your information, I noticed the same behavior in the skill logs with your discovery requests. Would you be able to try accessing the same URLs?

Update

The items call listed above has now been changed to resolve the timeout issue. If you would like to determine if you would be still affected by a timeout > 8s, please use the below call instead:

https://myopenhab.org/rest/items?fields=editable,groupNames,groupType,name,label,metadata,stateDescription,tags,type&metadata=alexa,channel,synonyms

1 Like
35

Both links were snappy. The first took 3-5 seconds, the second was instantaneous.

36

You’re getting a lot more data than just my echo devices though. Just a quick scroll appears to be everything in my items file with all the metadata. Is that what you want?

37

Yes. There is no options to do complex filtering through the OH rest api. So we get all items and filter at the skill level. The difference between v2 and v3 is that we now request some metadata parameters (alexa, channel & synonyms) and all the groups members recursively. So if you have a lot of groups with a lot members in them, than it would considerably increase the amount of data returned.

Anyway, based on your test, even at 5 seconds, the skill should still have plenty of time to process that call. Would you be able to add the output of the two calls into a pastebin session and send me the url via pm? Trying to determine if this related to the data content.

38

Done

39

Thanks for the information. So after initially testing your data without any issues, I realized that the first call I listed above was incorrectly formatted and basically the recursive parameter wasn’t processed.

I updated the URL above. Would you be able to give it another try and provide me with the output if possible? I only care about the first call at this point. Seeing the data you already sent me, I believe you might hit the 10 seconds window this time.

40

Yeah, that output was much more data. It took about 12-15 seconds to process. I PMed you the data.

41

Thanks. This confirms the initial assessment. There are no issues processing the data once available. We are looking into resolving this one shortly.

2 Likes
42

Good morning! What is the best practices to migrate from old v2 tags to v3 metadata?
Can I delete [“Lighting”] and add the metadata like this:
{channel="knx:device:176c8fbf:c", alexa="PowerController.powerState"}
after that, have I to delete and rediscovery the item on alexa or she automatic update them?
thanks for support

43

Hi, I have the same issue as omatzyo. All devices unresponsive for a few days through the alexa skill. Everything works fine through the myopenhab server, only the skill has stopped working. The response from the links you provided omatzyo are both very quick. I only have a dozen devices and one group so I’m not sure if it can be a processing delay (happy to send the output from the links if needed), I have been through the discovery process several times, restarting openhab, dissabling and re-enabling the skill etc but still nothing. Any help would be very much appreciated.

44

I have the same issue.

45

All depends on the level of customization you need. The v2 tags are here to stay for the time being, so you can stick with the ones you currently have, add new items with v3 metadata to start getting familiar the with new configuration settings, and ultimately start converting some of your v2 setup that can leverage the advanced functionalities such as group endpoints and mode/range/toggle interface controllers.

Keep in mind that both v2 tags and v3 metadata configuration can coexists with the latter taking precedence, and if you are using other integrations such as Google Assistant or HomeKit, you will need to keep these tags.

The conversion example you provided would make your item a switch that can just be turned on/off. You can refer to the examples listed in the metadata labels documentation section and you should familiarize yourself with the concept of display categories. If you want to only use v3 metadata, you can just migrate the v2 tags as v3 metadata labels or if you prefer to have granular settings, replace the tags with the relevant metadata capabilities and parameters.

As far as updating devices on the Alexa side, you just need to trigger a rediscovery via the mobile app, website or by asking your favorite echo device to “discover”. No need to delete devices unless you removed/unlinked an item from your OH configuration. In that event, these devices would show as offline in your Alexa smart home console.

46

Could you, in order of sequence, (1) try sending an Alexa command to one of your previously working discovered device, (2) initiate a discovery, and then (3) provide me the exact timestamp you completed these actions, your Amazon account location and the OH item name you tried to send the command to? This would help us find your requests in the relevant skill logs.

If you could provide me with the same information I requested above, that would be much appreciated.

47

My devices stopped responding after the update to V3.

When I click on the metadata link above it takes quite a few seconds before returning this;

{"error":{"message":"GET url \u0027https://alexa.amazon.co.uk/api/behaviors/entities?skillId\u003damzn1.ask.1p.music\u0027 failed: Bad Request","http-code":500,"exception":{"class":"org.openhab.binding.amazonechocontrol.internal.HttpException","message":"GET url \u0027https://alexa.amazon.co.uk/api/behaviors/entities?skillId\u003damzn1.ask.1p.music\u0027 failed: Bad Request","localized-message":"GET url \u0027https://alexa.amazon.co.uk/api/behaviors/entities?skillId\u003damzn1.ask.1p.music\u0027 failed: Bad Request"}}}
48

Which link are you referring to? And where are you seeing this error? This error message seems to be related to the Amazon Echo Control binding