[pimatic-echo] Control your pimatic devices using Amazon's echo

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Just got a real echo dot, because Alexapi doesnt work. this plugin. Thanks for developing it.

Just received my echo and echo dot
Sadly I can test them earliest monday as I’m traveling all weekend

Works great but I can’t use it at the moment as it will only find 15 devices and I’m using many dummy devices and without the exclude functionality and more supported devices I will not be able to use it.

However with this it’s really easy to use Alexa with pimatic! I’m just a power-user and need to wait for hue bridge emulation.

@thex you have only 15 supported devices or does the echo miss some devices?

could it be that the discovery time is too low for detecting all devices?
just my 2 cents and nothing of proof …

People using amazon-echo-ha-bridge are reporting of 26 devices: https://github.com/armzilla/amazon-echo-ha-bridge/issues/12. They are suggesting to run multiple instances. Maybe this is an option for pimatic-echo, too.
I will try to speed up things first, then see what i can do else.
I’m also thinking about implementing the discovery feature of pimatic, so it’s not always advertising the devices (like here: https://github.com/armzilla/amazon-echo-ha-bridge/pull/56). What do you guys think?

I have many more supported devices. According to some posts I read when researching echo seems to have a hardcoded limit to 16 wemo devices (can’t find link)

@thex I’ve seen this too. I guess i try to create a new upnp listener every time the device limit is reached. Maybe that will help.

A little bit off topic
You can call Alexa now “Computer”!
You can choose between" Echo", “Amazon”, “Alexa” and “Computer”

Yes, great!

They even integrated some Star Trek jokes “Computer, Earl-Grey hot”

@michbeck100 “somehow” the echo has now found 56 WEMO devices so it seems to scan in the background (or it was the new firmware)

Still either blacklist or whitelist would be really nice.

@thex you can exclude devices already. See https://github.com/michbeck100/pimatic-echo#configuration

"devices": [
  {
    "id": "switch",
    "class": "DummySwitch",
    "name": "Switch",
    "echo": {
      "exclude": true
    }
  }
]

Like in the pimatic-hap plugin i always implemented blacklists, as i wanted the integration as seamless as possible. I think that it’s no problem to have 56 devices in Alexa, as you don’t have to use them .

Love this plugin. It would be awesome to set the theemostat temp. Or ask for room temperature!

@p4co86 Thermostats come after dimming. But AFAIK you can just set the temperature, not ask for the current value. That’s a limitation of the echo.

@michbeck100
Thank you for the great plugin!!!

I have only a small problem in Pimatic it gives this error message:

error [pimatic]: Invalid config of device "rfswitchc7u8": Property "echo" is not a valid property

Here the part in the config:

 {
      "id": "rfswitchc7u8",
      "name": "Noch_frei_S7_U4",
      "class": "HomeduinoRFSwitch",
      "protocols": [
        {
          "name": "switch2",
          "options": {
            "unitCode": 2,
            "houseCode": 28
          }
        }
      ],
      "echo": {
        "name": "EchoSwitch",
        "additionalNames": [
          "Licht",
          "Lampe"
        ],
        "exclude": false
      }
    },

But the Alexa-App recognized the switch as “Lampe” and “Licht” and works fine.
So you have an idee what Pimatic wants?

@V1per that’s just a warning. You can ignore that. Which version of pimatic-echo are you using? This warning should be gone with the latest version 0.0.5.

@michbeck100 said in [pimatic-echo] Control your pimatic devices using Amazon's echo:

@V1per that’s just a warning. You can ignore that. Which version of pimatic-echo are you using? This warning should be gone with the latest version 0.0.5.

Ok, I ignore it.

My Version is 0.0.5 I have intalled the plugin today after waiting for 3 month that Alexa comes.

@V1per but the error message is still there with version 0.0.5?

@michbeck100
Yes

i have an error after installing pimatic-echo :
Loading plugin: “pimatic-echo” (0.0.5)
error: Use of const in strict mode

Alexa dont find anything.

@germanuser Haven’t seen that one before. Can anyone tell whats wrong? Maybe deleting the plugin and reinstalling again helps? Just to be sure, you didn’t change anything on the sources of your pimatic installation?