Release Candidate and Support: Amazon Echo Control Binding

I’am thinking about this, but then I will have a breaking change in the existing announcement channel. For the moment you can use it if you define the channel in the items file manually and send the following string to create the beep ‘{ “sound”: true, “title”: “”, “body”: “”}’ and send a command to the TTS channel afterwards with the text. Not yet tried, but it should work, would be nice to get feedback :wink:

Ok, I did the breaking change because the announcement channel was not yet merged in the documentation of the openHAB documentation. But you have to wait a little bit, I do not want to release a new version after this short period of time.

Sounds fantastic, thank you!

May I ask you when you will release this version?
Thank you so much!

Oliver

On Wednesday

On Wednesday. You are impatient :wink:

1 Like

Ladies and Gentlemen

Please welcome @Lukask within our community!

Lukas and I worked together to implement the controlling of smart home devices in the alexaechocontrol binding. This means you can control lights, plugs and other devices which are connected directly to the echo device or over a Alexa Skill. Also the Alexa Guard state in US should work, but is not yet tested because of lake of this feature in Europe.

But this features are very new with a lot of new code and so I do not want to have it in the Release Candidate version which should be as stable as possible.

So today we present 2 different versions of the binding. One nearly stable Release Candidate version with the latest bugfixes and a development version with all the cool new features and of course all changes of the latest release candidate version.

New Preview and Beta test thread

To make it easy for you, there are now 2 threads in this community. This one’s supporting the stable version. The other one is a new "Preview and Beta: Amazon Echo Control ".

If you want test our latest feature take a look on the new thread.

New Release Candidate RC3

The RC3 release candidate changed the behavior of the announcement channel a bit. It can now also be used by echo devices. But this causes a breaking change:

If you want to use the channel for Echo Show and Echo Spot devices without a spoken message, please use the JSON syntax format explained in the Tuturial section under Show an announcement on the echo show or echo spot.

The Version can be downloaded from the top most posting of this thread

6 Likes

Hello @michi,
in the announcements, the body-text will not dispayed at this time.
I use an echo spot with your RC3 and the following JSON-String:

{ “sound”: true, “title”: “SmartHome”, “body”: “Dies ist ein Test”}

the Sound is played and the titlie is visible.
what can i do?

Thanks for help
Ralph

My routine on the Echo will not start.
What could be the problem?
I tried: RC1, RC3, new link to Amazon account, created different routines

String Echo_Wohnzimmer_StartRoutine          "Start Routine"                         (gAlexa_Wohnzimmer) {channel="amazonechocontrol:echo:account1:echo1:startRoutine"}

In the rule:

Echo_Wohnzimmer_startRoutine.sendCommand("Daniel ist da")

routines name is “Daniel ist da”
Commands are working fine.

Thanks.

Hi all,
is it possible to let an echo play a short confirmation sound?
Like when locking your car and the alarm systems makes an short beep to tell you it´s locked.

Any ideas how to achieve this?

kind regards
Michael

Hi, I play a short attention tone before every TTS message. That helps a lot in hearing the upcoming message. Its just a command to play a short burst of one the alarm tones before the TTS. I can post the code later, but maybe its already in this thread somewhere.

edit …I found this in this thread from me… LOL.

Echo_AlarmSound.sendCommand('ECHO:system_alerts_melodic_07')
    Thread::sleep(9000)
    Echo_AlarmSound.sendCommand('')
    Echo_Volume.sendCommand(35)
    Thread::sleep(2000)
    Echo_Speak.sendCommand('Snow mode is set')

I will check my current code in case I have improved it since :slight_smile:

List of alarm sounds

1 Like

The post I made about making a schematic to illustrate the relationships between Echo Control, Alexa skill and device bindings was moved the post to here:

The easiest way would be the announcement channel. It plays a shot beep before the text sent to the channel is spoken

I have been inactive on here for the last 6 month. Is there a changelog of new features somewhere, which I can check to get up to date ?

For example is it possible to set timers via this binding ?

I would like to automatically create a timer for my livingroom echo if someone sets a timer on my kitchen echo dot.

Hello @michi

with the latest beta Version (2019-09-12) the error is still there…

some ideas?
ralph

New Announcement channel works great. Is there also a volume channel for announcements?
thx!

It´s not working :frowning:

I added the channel to my .items file like this

String echoArbeit_Announcement "Ankündigung" (Alexa_Arbeit, EchoCommands, Arbeit) {channel="amazonechocontrol:echo:Michael:echoArbeit:announcement"}

And tried to send an announcement like this

echoArbeit_Announcement.sendCommand('{"sound":true, "title":"Test", "body":"Test"}')

But the Echo Dot doesn´t do anything.

The log says

2019-09-12 21:44:15.215 [ome.event.ItemCommandEvent] - Item 'echoArbeit_Announcement' received command {"sound":true, "title":"Test", "body":"Test"}
2019-09-12 21:44:15.218 [nt.ItemStatePredictedEvent] - echoArbeit_Announcement predicted to become NULL

I mad another test in the Alexa app and the announcement works and is played on all Echos.

kind regards
Michael

Sorry, no, I have deleted this just before I did the new clean up of the thread. Maybe it was not my best idea…

No

This will be difficult to do with channels. But with REST calls through the binding proxy it should be possible already. But this would be only for users with advanced experience.

Are you using the version from this thread? Because it is tested already from other users and should work

It looks correct to me. I will check this, but I have no such a device to verify if it works, I can only check the JSON which is sent to the amazon server. Maybe the echo spot does not support the body?

I still had the Beta 8 :rofl:
Updated to RC3 and it works fine now!
Thanks