[Announce] LMS-lite certified Smart Home skill for Alexa

[philchillbill]

Works on Black Radio

Same don't know how to message on other players

🤔

I can see the Black radio requests in the logs. There is no mention of Touch anywhere in the logs, meaning — as I suspected — that Alexa is not invoking LMS_lite because your spoken command makes no sense to her in the context of this skill.

The only logical explanation is that the Alexa.RangeController interface is not attached to the Touch player because of a discovery error. Can you please ask Alexa to Discover Devices — she will tell you no NEW devices were found because she already 'knows' the Touch but she may pick up the capability if it was missed earlier. Plus, I can look at the discovery JSON you thusly generate and check for anomalies. Haven't touched the code since the Summer but Amazon might have changed something. Worth trying.

[castalla]

I can see the Black radio requests in the logs. There is no mention of Touch anywhere in the logs, meaning — as I suspected — that Alexa is not invoking LMS_lite because your spoken command makes no sense to her in the context of this skill.

The only logical explanation is that the Alexa.RangeController interface is not attached to the Touch player because of a discovery error. Can you please ask Alexa to Discover Devices — she will tell you no NEW devices were found because she already 'knows' the Touch but she may pick up the capability if it was missed earlier. Plus, I can look at the discovery JSON you thusly generate and check for anomalies. Haven't touched the code since the Summer but Amazon might have changed something. Worth trying.

Where will I find the JSON or is it on your system? Discover devices reported no new devices.

The device list reported 40 devices - lots of old and duplicate names.

[philchillbill]

Where will I find the JSON or is it on your system? Discover devices reported no new devices.

The JSON is in the Amazon cloud and only visible to me.

You do not have a device called Touch! 😮 It's called Touch echo. Maybe try the spoken command with that or else change the name to what you expected it to be and rediscover.

[castalla]

The JSON is in the Amazon cloud and only visible to me.

You do not have a device called Touch! 😮 It's called Touch echo. Maybe try the spoken command with that or else change the name to what you expected it to be and rediscover.

Same don't know fail message. ... with 'favourite 1 on touch echo'

'resume on touch echo' works
'turn off on touch echo' works
etc
😬

[philchillbill]

The device list reported 40 devices - lots of old and duplicate names.

Time to delete all the LMS_related devices from the Alexa app and then do a clean discovery. She will say nothing new found because if she ever in the past knew a device she will remember it and therefore it's not new. But the current devices will show up nevertheless.

Amazon's smart-home database is a junkyardthey should be ashamed of. Nothing I can do about it, unfortunately so you'll have to clean it up yourself.

[castalla]

Time to delete all the LMS_related devices from the Alexa app and then do a clean discovery. She will say nothing new found because if she ever in the past knew a device she will remember it and therefore it's not new. But the current devices will show up nevertheless.

Amazon's smart-home database is a junkyardthey should be ashamed of. Nothing I can do about it, unfortunately so you'll have to clean it up yourself.

Oh well, at a loose end this weekend, anyway! Later....

[castalla]

Oh well, at a loose end this weekend, anyway! Later....

Bingo! Renewed all LMS players, and renamed Touch echo to Touch...

Favourites working. BRILLIANT.

Thanks for patience and help.

[philchillbill]

staresy pointed out that on large collections of nested favorites, the numbering in LMS-lite (Python) did not match that of MediaServer (nodeJS). He kindly gave me his favorites.opml file to test with and now the updated LMS-lite has a 1:1 equivalence with MS. If you were accessing nested favorites from within Alexa routines by a high-level index you may need to verify that the targeted favorite is still correct. In response to the "List my favorites" command, MS calls them out and shows them on the screen in the order now used.

[castalla]

staresy pointed out that on large collections of nested favorites, the numbering in LMS-lite (Python) did not match that of MediaServer (nodeJS). He kindly gave me his favorites.opml file to test with and now the updated LMS-lite has a 1:1 equivalence with MS. If you were accessing nested favorites from within Alexa routines by a high-level index you may need to verify that the targeted favorite is still correct. In response to the "List my favorites" command, MS calls them out and shows then on the screen in the order now used.

Thanks.

I'm a simple soul, so I only have single favourites. It's working perfectly.

[staresy]

Thanks.

I'm a simple soul, so I only have single favourites. It's working perfectly.

Cheers Phil,
All working fine for me too

[slartibartfast]

My skill unlinked itself again after I turned off LMS for an hour or so. I can't remember if this is normal but ngrok wasn't even running so I needed to run the setup.sh script to start it. Oh and the UUID changed again after linking the skill even though I used the same PC and browser as last time so I had to edit the updater script as well.

[philchillbill]

My skill unlinked itself again after I turned off LMS for an hour or so. I can't remember if this is normal but ngrok wasn't even running so I needed to run the setup.sh script to start it. Oh and the UUID changed again after linking the skill even though I used the same PC and browser as last time so I had to edit the updater script as well.

It will only unlink itself if 'run' while LMS is not accessible. That would happen if you issued a voice command, if a routine ran, or if Amazon performed an auto-discovery of smart-home devices. You don't have to run the setup.sh install script, just the ngrok_updater.sh script.

If your uuid changed then your browser somehow forgot it. It's kept in localStorage which is not cleared when cookies are cleared, but can be cleared by other means. If you used some utility that clears out your localStorage then that would explain it being absent. If your browser does not identify you with a known uuid, my back-end will always assign a new one as you are 'unknown' without your uuid.

[slartibartfast]

It will only unlink itself if 'run' while LMS is not accessible. That would happen if you issued a voice command, if a routine ran, or if Amazon performed an auto-discovery of smart-home devices. You don't have to run the setup.sh install script, just the ngrok_updater.sh script.

If your uuid changed then your browser somehow forgot it. It's kept in localStorage which is not cleared when cookies are cleared, but can be cleared by other means. If you used some utility that clears out your localStorage then that would explain it being absent. If your browser does not identify you with a known uuid, my back-end will always assign a new one as you are 'unknown' without your uuid.

I had turned off my Echo Show as well, maybe Amazon performed an auto-discovery when I turned it back on. It didn't tell me it was unlinked until around midnight though. I haven't knowingly cleared local storage. It must be well over a year since I last had to do this. I am pretty sure when this has happened before that an ngrok tunnel was running even though the skill wasn't linked but I could be wrong. This time a tunnel didn't exist.

[philchillbill]

This weekend, I'm migrating smartskills.tech to a more capable hosting package with SSD speeds (at the same provider, it's just an upgrade). The current hosting is set to expire Mon 13th. Hopefully the transition will be instant but if there are any glitches then the account-database may be offline for a while. That would mean no new skill linking(s) and no new ngrok-submits until resolved. The skill itself is hosted in an Amazon Lambda function using DynamoDB for storage so it is not itself affected.