Ah. Got it.
It’s what our IT department overlords refer to as a “training issue”. I can work with that, or can experiment with changing it as a learning experience. Thanks.
More details on the Amazon Alexa app: Since it’s tied to the SmartThings hub, the devices show up under the “Smart Home” panel with some rudimentary controls. For thermostats, there’s only the current temp setting with plus and minus buttons.
Under your handler, the user can press the plus button and the display will increment by one degree. But, upon receiving no confirmation from the device, the display will revert back to the original setting after a few seconds.
This behavior makes sense actually, given your recent reply on the nature of the design.
Not that I need it, but if you ever work on this handler again, you may want to consider an option in the config to enable incremental degree transmissions, with a few word explainer.
Remember the IT mantra: good UI design reduces help desk support volume!
Does anything happen when you ask an Alexa device to, “set the [device name] to 72 degrees,” for example?
Alexa’s primarily meant to be controlled by voice anyway, isn’t she?
There are probably ways, with an Alexa routine and SmartThings virtual switches, to even get her to raise (or lower) the temperature by a degree if you say something like, “Alexa, crank it up one degree in here.”
That would probably require a custom smartapp or webcore to do something like define the current setpoint as n, and then set the temp to n+1 when a certain virtual switch is turned on.
If you are using the Alexa app to manually control your device, you might as well just use the SmartThings app and edit the device handler as needed to get the functions you’re looking for.
Hi @marktheknife
Sorry about that confusing detail. The Alexa note was about a debugging process I did - to see why the verbal command wasn’t working with Ron’s handler. You’re right, normally I would go straight to SmartThings or just tell that little Amazon hockey puck what I wanted ;-]
@Ron’s comment of a couple days ago has helped me understand what’s going on a little better. His handler apparently doesn’t set temperature points - unless it’s part of a mode setting command.
Great, I just took a look at the DH and I just commented out the code that sends the temp to the zxt-120 so you should find if very easy to add it back in if you want. Just remove the comments here.