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

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@Patjee: Perfect someone more with an Echo 2. Do you get a positive response when you try to dim to 0% or 100%?

@michbeck100: Did you already ordered your Echo 2? I’m really interested in the result of your device discovery. For me each activated device came up two times. With different types.

@ortin It’s coming tomorrow. But i won’t test before the weekend.

Short question regarding button devices. Currently only the first defined button device is working, even though a 2nd, 3rd… will be found. Its not really a bug for me, I can define a button device for each one and it will work, but maybe this can be fixed somehow in future?

@ortin Please raise an issue on github, as actually all buttons should be working.

@ortin I received my brand new Echo 2 yesterday. Still no success when discovering devices
But if there is something to test to get the Echo 2 properly working, i’ll do.
Maybe someone can post the plugin config and a device config from a working switch with an Echo 2. I hope i was not to stupid to configure it o.O

@schrecki: Did you change the default port of the echo plugin to 80? If not you have to do so. But take care for the default pimatic port. Out of the box it is 80, so you have to change ist to any not used. You can do this directly in the config.json.

@ortin Wohoo! It works!!! Thanks a lot!
Maybe this was mentioned in a Post i did not recognize…

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

Please raise an issue on github, as actually all buttons should be working.

There seems to be a problem with my 3rd buttonDevices within a routine I create only. Somehow the first button (which is not part of the routine) will be used for execution instead of the used button (3rd buttonDevice). No idea what is wrong here. Will give it one more try tomorrow.
When I operate the buttonDevices directly from the device list. All work as expected.

Just released version 0.4.8 which supports reusing port 80 if pimatic uses it already.

@Patjee The issue when dimming to 100% is also fixed with this version.

Today my new echo arrived, so these changes are basically based on the issues I found using it.

Thx for the new version. Are you using now both echo gens in parallel? Do you have the same problem that each device gets discovered twice, but as different types?

@ortin Probably, i haven’t tested with both echoes parallel, yet. I hope i will have the time this weekend.

During the last days I tried to connect my pimatic with some Amazon Alexa devices, an Echo Dot 2, a Fire Tab 7 with Alexa app (latest firmware update 5.6.0.0 with Alexa) and a normal smartphone with Alexa app.

It does not work as expected and I have some problems.

@michbeck100: You have written some posts above that a reusing of port 80 is possible for the echo plugin version > 0.4.7 even if pimatic is using port 80. Did I understood this right? So the problem to set different ports is no longer existing? This is very convenient for me because I have some connected display and sensor devices with ESP8266 and these devices need IP and port of the pimatic server to query or send the data. It is much work with the Arduino IDE to reprogramm them all.

For the now described tests I used echo plugin 0.4.8 with port 80 and pimatic server with port 80. So if this is not working even with echo plugin 0.4.8 please tell me and stop reading this post here.

I used all Alexa devices with one Amazon account. So all detected smart home devices can be used by all these 3 Alexa devices.

Fire Tab with Alexa app: longer pressing of home button, Alexa light at the bottom of the screen is switched on and I can speak to Alexa: “Schalter eins ein” or “Schalter eins aus”.

Echo Dot 2: “Alexa” - light comes - “Schalter eins ein” or “Schalter eins aus”.

Normal smartphone with Alexa app: no speaking - the smart home screen of the Alexa app shows the device and I can tap on the device. Now smartphone display is showing a lamp symbol and the text “Licht ist aus” and below “Helligkeit auf 0%”. Below these texts there is a slider to change the light intensity and I can slide it from left (0%) to right (100%). When I take up my finger this is sent to the controlled device i.e. to pimatic server.

On pimatic server I have defined a dummy switch

  "settings": {
    "locale": "de",
    "debug": false,
    "logLevel": "debug",
    "httpServer": {
      "enabled": true,
      "port": 80
    },
...
...
  "plugins": [
    {
      "plugin": "echo",
      "debug": true,
      "active": true,
      "port": 80
    },
...
...
    {
      "id": "schalter1",
      "name": "Schalter 1",
      "class": "DummySwitch",
      "echo": {
        "additionalNames": [],
        "active": true,
        "name": "Schalter 1"
      }
    },

Speaking to Alexa on Echo Dot 2 and on Fire Tab brings an entry as the following into the pimatic log.

16:46:28.347 [pimatic-echo] debug: changing state for Schalter 1: {
16:46:28.347 [pimatic-echo] debug:>  "{\"on\": false}": ""
16:46:28.347 [pimatic-echo] debug:>}

When changing brightness with the slider of the Alexa app on my smartphone the following is store in the log file.

19:23:38.655 [pimatic-echo] debug: changing state for Schalter 1: {
19:23:38.655 [pimatic-echo] debug:>  "{\"on\": true,\"bri\":255}": ""
19:23:38.655 [pimatic-echo] debug:>}

Interesting is that the slider on the smartphone display jumps back to 0% after some seconds. I guess that an acknoledgement is missing.

And every 10 seconds the log is filled with these lines produced by the echo plugin.

19:23:46.890 [pimatic-echo] debug: << server got: M-SEARCH * HTTP/1.1
19:23:46.890 [pimatic-echo] debug:>Host: 239.255.255.250:1900
19:23:46.890 [pimatic-echo] debug:>Man: "ssdp:discover"
19:23:46.890 [pimatic-echo] debug:>ST: ssdp:all
19:23:46.890 [pimatic-echo] debug:>MX: 5
19:23:46.890 [pimatic-echo] debug:>
19:23:46.890 [pimatic-echo] debug:> from 192.168.99.99:56638
19:23:46.898 [pimatic-echo] debug: complete sending all responses.

IP 239.255.255.250 is not in my LAN and 192.168.99.99 is not the pimatc server in my LAN.

If I look to the pimatic web interface and display the variable connected to the state of the dummy switch “$schalter1.state” it stays always on false. And of course the display of the dummy switch on the screen does not change. Only the communication to the pimatic server is logged.

Up to this point I have come. Please help me to get it working.

@stefang reusing port 80 is possible, but ONLY if pimatic is using this port, too. 239.255.255.250 is the advertisement ip for UPNP. 192.168.99.99 is the ip of the UPNP client (in you case probably echo, but this might be some other device, as a lot of devices use UPNP discovery)

Regarding the problems of pimatic-echo currently:

I’m having the same issues and its currently not obvious what the problem is. I’m still looking into this.

To all brave pimatic-echo users: Everyone who wants to test, can check if the latest beta version fixes the problems that were introduced with the last versions and the new echo devices.

To install this version refer to https://forum.pimatic.org/topic/1114/updated-how-to-install-a-plugin-from-github-using-npm-or-git

You can either install the latest version from GitHub or install with the beta tag:

sudo service pimatic stop
cd /home/pi/pimatic-app/node_modules/ 
sudo rm -rf pimatic-echo
sudo npm install pimatic-echo@beta --unsafe-perm
sudo service pimatic start

IMPORTANT: This version adds a “security” feature. You have to start the pairing mode by using the “discover devices” button in the devices section of pimatic. Then you have 20 seconds to tell Alexa to search for devices. After this your echo is registered as new user in pimatic-echo. These users get persisted in a file named “echoUsers” in the pimatic home dir, so they will survive a restart. Every “unknown” echo, won’t be able to discover devices.

If you are using multiple echoes from different generations, you might recognize, that Alexa finds all devices twice, with different types. To prevent this, just use one echo to discover devices. The other echoes will pick these devices up, too.

Just released version 0.4.12., which fixes includes some more fixes. This time no beta anymore. So just update normally.

@michbeck100 : Just came home and the first was to try your new plugin version. I tested all my three Alexa devices. Everything works.

Super Job. Thank you very much.

Now I’m sure that I will keep my Black Monday Week Echo Dot 2. But the full integration of Alexa with my pimatic system has to wait until the next weekend.

Hi michbeck,
is there any way to force the echo plugin to use just one interface oder ip?

i configured the ip address to use but the echo plugin binds on all IPs on my system to port 80. But i need Port 80 on an other IP for another service. I configured my lighthttpd to bind on the second IP and i will not work cause Port 80 is already in use.

@christopher-täufert not sure if this possible. I’m using expressjs and it just accepts a port AFAIK. There is no parameter for an IP address.
Seems to be possible: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9986220/bind-expressjs-to-a-specific-ip-address

@christopher-täufert I’ve implemented this in the latest commit on github. Please try if the current change works for you. Please note, that this will probably only work if the server isn’t shared with pimatic (when the ip’s of both are equal).