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Amazon Echo


TheaterExtreme

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First let me say we have 5 voice pods and 2 echoes.....I just wish you could invoke echo, make her talk back, and ask questions....thats the best part of voice pod.  I start a movie and VP asks if I want to close the shades.   We love echo, but its a far cry from voice pod.....if you have a good programmer and bespoke, voice pod is very powerful. 

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10 hours ago, C4Jedi said:

I did that!  Have it in composer and all what the iP address is!  No workie! No bueño!

If your Echo is not set up with a fixed IP, make sure it has a DHCP reservation in the router so the IP isn't changed.  It's quite possible the IP has changed between the time you initially found the address and entered it in the properties page.  (And without a fixed IP or reservation chances are high that the Echo will eventually end up with a different IP)

 

I decided not to mess with it and just ran the Echo set up process again to set up a fixed IP.

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On December 28, 2015 at 9:05 PM, South Africa C4 user said:

Getting my Echo tomorrow and looking forward to playing with this driver!

So I got my Echo (purchased in South Africa) which looks beautiful... But the app needed for setup is not available in the South African Apple App Store... I get redirected to the US App Store where I can see the app but cannot download it as I don't have a US Apple account... The joys of living in Africa.  Anyway, I am off on holiday for 2 weeks and will figure out how to get round this minor challenge when I get back...

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try going into your web browser (on a computer which is on the same network as the Echo), and browse to echo.amazon.com.  That SHOULD (not sure how it works in SA!) bring up the admin console for your Echo.  I prefer using that to using the mobile app anyways...especially when making changes to the IP settings and when adding new control4 triggers for the Echo.

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16 hours ago, chopedogg88 said:

You don't need a static IP...just need to find out what the IP address is, and static is one easy way to do that.  You can always just go into your router settings interface and find the IP address from there.

Thanks again for the help. I have got the Echo working now - much to my wife's annoyance as she is trying to sleep and keeps hearing me talking to some other woman (Alexa). I must say the voice recognition is very impressive. I have even had my dealer install the driver (last week) and done some basic programming in anticipation of the Echo arriving. My only challenge is that I cannot figure out the IP address of my Echo... I have tried going into my router's webpage and can't see the IP addresses for any thing on my network so guess I am looking in the wrong place. Any suggestions? Otherwise this will be a job for my dealer next year!

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great so did you get the Echo driver working then?  Wouldn't it be nice if the Echo just displayed its IP address and MAC in its settings menu, like every other type of networked equipment?  I would certainly get fewer support calls ;)

perhaps if you email them that request they will send it to their Dev team...

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Thanks... Will do and then off to bed and hope to have their email before I fly in the morning then I can say "Alexa turn holiday on" which I have programmed (I think) to do what my holiday custom button does (in terms of alarm settings, lights etc.). Sounds like fun :-)

Thanks all for the help. I did not expect to get this far this evening!

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41 minutes ago, chopedogg88 said:

great so did you get the Echo driver working then?  Wouldn't it be nice if the Echo just displayed its IP address and MAC in its settings menu, like every other type of networked equipment?  I would certainly get fewer support calls ;)

perhaps if you email them that request they will send it to their Dev team...

Would be great if the Echo showed IP and Mac addresses... That said, I have managed (after about 20 attempts) to set up a fixed IP address which I don't think my dealer uses for anything else ?. I have also got the driver working and it looks great. Will play with it when I get back from holidays...

My only problem was that I told Alexa to Turn TV on (which is programmed to press the third button on one of my keypads (this button turns off lights, chooses a source and turns on the TV). For some reason (probably my bad programming - although I thought this was fairly straight forward), C4 pushed the top button on that same keypad. Sadly the top button turns on all the lights in our bedroom suite, woke the wife and I am now in the dog box...

Off to bed now... Will debug my programming when I am back. Really appreciate all the help in getting this working! The Echo and driver look really great!

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Some notes that might help prevent others from experiencing strange or unexpected happenings when using this driver.  I suspect I only ran into problems because I inadvertantly exceeded the number of allowable triggers.  

1) Only have one instance of the driver in the project per Amazon account.   (The IP address is for the Echo that will discover the "devices", not necessarily the one that will process the commands).

2) You can have multiple Echos in the house (on the same Amazon account) - they will all respond to defined triggers.

3) There is a limit of 30 "devices" (triggers) per Amazon account (not per Echo).  (They will be listed as Phillips Hue lights).

4) In order to see which triggers Alexa has recognized look in the Echo configuration under Settings/Connected Home/Devices (either from the mobile Amazon Alexa ap or at echo.amazon.com). The driver can't get any information from the Amazon account, so this is the only way to confirm by name which triggers are known to Alexa.

5) Reboot the controller after you remove instance(s) of the driver.

6) if you experience any weirdness, "Forget" the device(s) from the Amazon and rediscover/recreate them in the driver.  You will probably only see weirdness if you have more than one driver instance and/or more than 30 total triggers defined (the driver won't let you create more than 30 triggers).

7) I haven't tried this yet, but it might be possible to get around the 30 trigger limit by creating a group in the Alexa ap (e.g. Create a group called My House that contains triggers you want to fire all together (First Floor, Second Floor, Basement)).

 

(Thanks to Ari for absolutely awesome support in figuring this stuff out)

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Just found this - if you are having a recent issue with Alexa responding to "<trigger> lights ON/OFF/UP/DOWN", this may be why.

http://betanews.com/2016/01/10/using-amazon-echo-to-control-your-home-theres-a-minor-change-you-need-to-know-about/

 

also - experienced something bizarre today - no matter if my command was ON, OFF, UP or DOWN, the C4 event that fired was OFF.    I had this happen for two triggers.  Haven't tried others yet.  It may be related to the Amazon software change mentioned in the linked story - don't know for sure.  But at least two of my triggers no longer fire the events they did a couple days ago.  And I'm positive I know the events that are actually running, because I have very detailed logging in place.

I am going to try deleting and re-adding the triggers from the driver to see if that fixes the two I have problems with.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is a great driver and fantastic capability.  I already love the capability- heading to bed it's a simple "Alexa turn off the house" and we're done.  Same thing with lights... awesome.

I did find another limitation that hopefully a future software upgrade will solve.  If your trigger word contains "Music" or if the trigger is a common music genre it triggers amazon music on the echo rather than triggering programming in Control4.  For example- if I say "turn on country" Alexa goes to amazon music rather than turning on country music in Control4.

Hopefully there's a work around eventually.  Who knows- Amazon music is available on sonos... maybe sonos will integrate with the echo like the philips hue system and we'll be able to use that capability to trigger music in control4 instead of the echo defaulting to amazon music.

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I wrote about the limitation in another thread.   There isn't  (and can't be) a workaround.  This driver presents Control4 to Echo as Phillips Hue bridge.  Echo sees and processes any of the triggers defined in the driver as a light.  Period.  There is no possibility for any keyword intercept or two-way processing.   

Unless the driver is changed to use an entirely different process the driver can't provide any interaction.  It's one-way only  - "ooh - Echo thinks I'm a light - do something".  The order in which the triggers are processes is dependent on the order in which Echo processes device and keyword recognition.  Since triggers like "Music", Volume", "Play", "Playlist", "Shades", etc. are for functions processed before the Phillips Hue interface is even called, the current driver will never get a call from Echo with one of those words.  When Alexa says "Okay" after recognizing a defined trigger word sequence defined in the driver, that is generated by the Echo process that recognizes a Phillips Hue device and has nothing to do with the driver.  I would love to be able to invoke the "Simon Says" command in a C4 event so you could have Alexa say whatever you wanted.  (If you say, "Alexa, Simon Says <some word or sentance>, Alexa will speak <whatever word or sentance>)

The current driver is terrific, but it's really just a trick.   In order for Echo to be used as a true voice integration solution with C4 there needs to be a driver written that uses a completely different method instead of "pretend I'm a Phillips Hue bridge" which integrate directly using the AVS API or doing something like defining a Control4 Skill (application) for the Echo.

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I put the word 'Sonos' in front of all my music triggers, so Alexa doesn't get confused. Never had a problem since then. You could use anything - like 'bobs country' (though I wouldn't recommend listening to country at all - bad for your brain :).

I run this driver and it is fantastic. I don't really get the complaint about it not being 'real'. Sure, I would love something that also acted as a speaker point - i.e., made announcements when stuff happens (I.e., "back door opened - intruder!!"). But that just isn't what it does right now.

I really don't want acknowledgements. It is pretty infallible, I don't need her yapping about it. I am already irritated by the "ok". Really don't need it at all.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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