Can you programmatically modify the Echo Show screen?

Devices & Integrations
1

It seems to me that one of the most useful ways I could utilize my Echo Show is as a smart light/smart status indicator. The particular example I have in mind (to show the idea) is:
Just before I start brushing my teeth I hit a smart button that

  • activates the recirculator (which starts warming up water)
  • starts a 2 minute timer
  • at the end of that timer switches off the recirculator (water is now hot, keeping the recirculator going stresses copper joints in the pipes)

Now this basic routine is fine but suffers from no feedback. It would be nice to augment it with a visual display. One possibility is to throw up a full screen timer on the Echo Show. A second possibility is something like force the entire display to red while heating, then flip it to blue once heating is ended.

The goal is generically

  • control the Show without talking AND
  • have that control in the form of taking over the display.

There’s clearly some market for smart indicator lights (obviously people do this with Hue, but look also at iDevices whose entire product line is predicated on adding a smart indicator light to an otherwise standard smart device! [And good for them! It’s a seriously great idea!!!])
But for some reason I can find no way to use an Echo Show for this sort of task :sob:

2

You could use echo speaks and Webcore. Might not need webcore, some of the add on apps in echo speaks may be able to do that. I have never played around with them as I use webcore.
With Webcore you could have the Show play a sound on stop and start, or play music, or say recirculator on and then recirculator off.

I am not sure if you can set timers with Echo speaks.

3

Is there a starter document that describes everything that is required to set these up?
I keep seeing references to bits of github code or wiki pages, but there seems to be no document saying you will need A and B and C, and you start by installing this, then configuring that?

4

Echo Speaks Is very powerful, but also fairly complex to set up.

You could do everything already described with Echo Speaks just with Alexa routines and a virtual device, but unfortunately, none of that gives you what you asked for, which was the ability to change the display on the echo show.

FAQ: Can I trigger an Echo Action without Speaking to It?

I may be mistaken, but I don’t think Amazon exposes that ability at this time.

For details on the installation process for echo speaks:

https://tonesto7.github.io/echo-speaks-docs/

You can ask any additional questions about echo speaks in the author thread for that code:

[Release] Echo Speaks v3 + Actions

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5

Yes I should have made that more clear in my earlier post, you can not change the screen, but you can use the echo device to alert you of the state change.

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6

OK, thanks. That’s the actual type of answer I was wanted: “can’t be done”.

So I’ll go with plan B, which uses HomeKit and a device with a controllable indicator light (aka “night light”). I’d hoped to be able to recycle the Echo Show, but c’est la vie.

Thanks to JDRoberts for the echo speaks installation info; I’ll go through that and see if there’s some other way I can get value out of the Echo Show. (Though, to be honest, almost everything I want to do is more visually based than conversationally based, so I might be disappointed. Hopefully at some point Amazon realizes how much they’re limiting themselves?)

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