Ecobee plugin continued

Posted on
Thu Jul 19, 2018 8:26 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Ecobee plugin continued

Putting this thread in my Forums for now, as I'm actively working on the plugin.

Pre-release of the updated plugin is available here: https://github.com/IndigoDomotics/indig ... /tag/1.2.0

Logging is a mess right now, it'll get fixed before a public release.

This release has:

Fixes for loss of authentication.
User adjustable update interval
Merged two pull requests from original project for fan and climate controls.

Comments and questions are fine in this thread, but please put actual bug reports in the issue tracker: https://github.com/IndigoDomotics/indig ... gin/issues

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Thu Jul 19, 2018 10:55 am
jay (support) offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Thanks for taking this one on - I know it's been a sore spot for a while.

Jay (Indigo Support)
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Posted on
Thu Jul 19, 2018 11:14 am
blysik offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Thanks! I've installed it, and so far so good.

Posted on
Thu Jul 19, 2018 11:19 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

jay (support) wrote:
Thanks for taking this one on - I know it's been a sore spot for a while.


I have four of the Ecobee 3 units. It was annoying the heck out of me too.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Sun Jul 22, 2018 11:27 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Pre-release 1.2.1 posted on GitHub: https://github.com/IndigoDomotics/indig ... /tag/1.2.1

Fixes for reported bugs.

setAwayStatus was never implemented and never worked. I'm taking the Action out.

I think I found the _resumeProgram error.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Mon Jul 23, 2018 7:43 am
rapamatic offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

So far so good - working for me - staying connected reliably.

I do see log messages when it refreshes tokens (although I have debugging turned off) - but I assume that's normal.

Now that the plugin is working reliably its time for me to think of good use cases and things to automate with it - before I had mostly just used the plugin to monitor things...


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Posted on
Mon Jul 23, 2018 7:51 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Mine lost authentication yesterday. I still think it's Ecobee's servers doing weird things. I'm getting code 500 errors when I don't think I should be. Still working on that.

As for the logging, there are some events getting logged as errors that should be at the info or debug level. I need to clean that up.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Tue Jul 24, 2018 10:30 am
wmldwilly offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Now that the plugin is working reliably its time for me to think of good use cases and things to automate with it - before I had mostly just used the plugin to monitor things...


Some of my favorite use cases, that I LOST when I "upgraded to less functionality" from Venstars with insteon modules to Ecobees:

Creating short bursts of heating and cooling for X minutes rather than putting the system in a narrower band of temps and potentially (read also: all the time) having them left in those settings when noone was home, or left running those settings when the little ones or babies or guests are sleeping.

Connecting those short "cool off for 10 minutes" or "warm up for 5 minutes" bursts of adjustment to hard buttons on walls like insteon key panels or to big easy to identify buttons on a web page on an iPod placed centrally for family/guests to use.

Compensating for Ecobee's inability to limit it's "fresh circulation" feature (the feature that lets the user request the circulation fan run for X minutes per hour to keep air from growing "stale") to certain hours or certain conditions. It's a lovely feature, but when it runs all night long and wakes up the babies or guests it's not so lovely. Indigo combined with insteon and the old venstars could prevent that quite easily...the super expensive Ecobees? not so much. :(

Improve on the home/away recognition ability with geofencing (for those that have figured out a robust geofencing solution for Indigo...). Sometimes I'm "home" but I'm "not in the house" for periods of time...and of course Ecobee doesn't quite understand that but one should be able to make it understand with Indigo and presence recognition.

A better home/away status handling (if and when that makes it back in to the plugin...I saw the note about it getting taken out. Perhaps there was something in there as a placeholder for future implementation?) than one can find with Homekit...since as far as I know Homekit still has no understanding of or ability to work with the "auto heat/cool" state. Maybe this isn't true anymore but when I last took a stab at homekit useage it includes no concept of auto heat/cool. Either you are in heat mode, cool mode, or off mode. Thats' fine for some parts of the world, but in urban Los Angeles where I live it's possible at various times of the year for the temperature to reach the 90s during the day and fall into the 60s at night, and being in one mode or the other mode isn't workable.

Those are a few of my faves. :)

Posted on
Tue Jul 24, 2018 10:53 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Let me be clear about a few things...

First, the primary reason I took on this plugin was to solve the authentication issue. It's useless if it stop talking to the Ecobee servers on a random basis. So pretty much all changes to date are to fix this issue, or to make it easier to debug this issue. Along the way, I might do a few (easy) enhancements.

For now, special use cases like @wmldwilly lists, need to be implemented in scripts or actions/timers/triggers outside of the plugin. If there is some functionality needed in the plugin, then file a very specific enhancement request on GitHub. This needs to be either implementing missing functionality for the standard Indigo Thermostat device, or exposing some part of the Ecobee API. The EcoBee API is fairly limited. Pretty much the only things you can do directly with the API are documented here: https://www.ecobee.com/home/developer/a ... ndex.shtml

That said, if there's a use case that I really like and would use myself, I'll probably put it in the plugin. I'm just not committing to do it for all of them.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Tue Jul 24, 2018 11:20 am
wmldwilly offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

hey don't get me wrong - i'm super happy the authentication thing is on the way to being fixed...can't do anything at all with it if it won't stay connected, as we've all learned! :P

I'm not asking for anything special either, and all the "special cases" I listed are possible with it now...IF it stays connected! Well save for manipulating home/away...I suppose that's the only thing I'd be actually hoping gets addressed as an expansion of what it does now, and I say that more because I noticed in the past the Ecobee doesn't seem to return to it's previous status after it's given a direct change and not because it's some huge deficiency in the interconnect between Indigo and ecobee.

What's your feeling on fan operation? I've never been clear on if it was in there and intended to work but just didn't yet/was broken, or it's "placeholdered" and not really intended to work yet?

Again...THANK YOU for your efforts and yes fixing the authentication thing is awesome. I'm not demanding a bunch of things you don't want to deliver, I'm just asking the question.

Posted on
Tue Jul 24, 2018 11:57 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Fan operation is a legit issue. I've never tried to use the plugin to control the fan mode, but it "should work". At least with the current Indigo UI, you should be able to switch between "always on" and "auto". I did a quick test and the first command worked but the second did not. It would really help me if you would do your own tests and create an issue on GitHub with the results (since I don't think it'll work properly).

Disabling the "fresh circulation" feature is essentially a "fan hold". There's no equivalent to this in Indigo semantics (no "off" mode for fans), so that would be an enhancement. Please do create a GitHub issue for that as well, since I think it's a worthwhile thing to add (my wife was actually complaining about this when she was sick in bed last month).

In short, test the heck out of what you have now, and if anything that you think should work per the Indigo client UI doesn't, file a bug.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Tue Jul 24, 2018 2:52 pm
FlyingDiver offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

One thing I will be adding very soon - an Event that will trigger when authentication is lost. That way you can set up a notification via email or SMS or whatever.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Fri Jul 27, 2018 10:44 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Pre-release 1.2.2 available: https://github.com/IndigoDomotics/indig ... /tag/1.2.2

Please post ANY instances of authentication errors. Preferably with Debug logging on. I've changed the logging code to provide more granularity, and Debug level won't flood your logs as much as it used to ("Detailed Debugging" will still do that).

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Sun Jul 29, 2018 1:51 am
wmldwilly offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

FlyingDiver wrote:
Fan operation is a legit issue. I've never tried to use the plugin to control the fan mode, but it "should work". At least with the current Indigo UI, you should be able to switch between "always on" and "auto". I did a quick test and the first command worked but the second did not. It would really help me if you would do your own tests and create an issue on GitHub with the results (since I don't think it'll work properly).

Disabling the "fresh circulation" feature is essentially a "fan hold". There's no equivalent to this in Indigo semantics (no "off" mode for fans), so that would be an enhancement. Please do create a GitHub issue for that as well, since I think it's a worthwhile thing to add (my wife was actually complaining about this when she was sick in bed last month).

In short, test the heck out of what you have now, and if anything that you think should work per the Indigo client UI doesn't, file a bug.


Will do as soon as I get back home!

Over these past years tinkering with it I've seen exactly what you saw - one flip of the fan state is successful, any subsequent flips are ignored. I've never been able to ascertain what exactly brings one back to that state of the first flip working and none of any subsequent calls.

As for the lacking of indigo semantics, I don't think there's a problem really - I think it plays along just fine because there is indeed no such thing as "fan off" in any thermostat operation model...or it wouldn't be "forced air" anymore! :lol: one is either calling for it to run alone, or surrendering it to the controller to slave with a call for heat or call for cool.

I think personally the plug-in would need no further enhancement for fan handling other than discovering the magic decoder ring on the API side that correctly flips it from "fan on" back to "fan auto" reliably and doesn't die on the 2nd call. Making it "turn on for 15 minutes and then back off" so to speak is just a 2 step action group: step 1 flips the fan to Always On, step 2 flips the fan back to "Auto on" with a 15 minute delay.

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Posted on
Sun Jul 29, 2018 5:10 pm
bhough17 offline
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Re: Ecobee plugin continued

Coming into this thread late, hoping that my request isn't one of those "Um, you can do that by…" answers.

I've had the authentication issues, will download the beta this evening and try it. Thanks for the fix!

One functional enhancement I'd love to see is the ability to get the ecobee's current heat/cool/auto/off state and save it in an Indigo variable.

Here's my current setup and issue:
- if any of my doors sensors show on/open for more than 10 minutes, I assume that the people in the house like the outside air temperature and I set the ecobee to Off using an Action Group
- when all the doors become closed, I set the mode of the ecobee to Auto
- there are, however, times when I would like to tell the ecobee "Hey, before the doors were left open, you were in this *specific* mode, and now that the doors are all closed, I'd like you to go back to that *specific* mode"

So if I could store that *specific* mode in an Indigo variable…

Thanks

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