Topics created by Steve Lee

Since your PayPal’s closed, maybe try reaching out to their support team directly?

@Russ Good idea, thanks!

I've yet to explore routines. They do increases the number of places to configure though. And no nice text file way with Alexa!

I did try adding words to created a new command

mac setlist ... mac setlist next

But it doesn't work due to the way Alexa always matches the first one

So I'd have to add multiple 3 word items. Yuck Shame we can add out own lexicon 😞

I was going to use Routines for repeat timers but on reading the docs they don't take parameters which really limits them for all applications 😢

@Russ Oh, I must have misunderstood, they seemed to in the articles I linked. Oh well, shame and very limiting to skill creators. may words get pick on my Alexa for other purposes - eg play - so it's hard.

@Russ

aha - my bad!

I had voice set to "mac pitch" for both.

I could have sworn voice was ignored for Smart Home and trigger became the device name.

@Russ yay! I'll give it a go

@Russ Sorry for being unclear.

Yes the smart home skill.

Ah. So the device name appears to be the Trigger field and as I used the same for both fields all is good 🙂 I hadn;t grokked that Voice was being ignored.

In fact I eventually found I can use two words for device name (trigger field). You have to be careful as uncommon words can be confused and second words like "play" or "run" can get misinterpreted to do other things as Alexa already handles them.

I do not see "on" or "off" passed as parameters, but the Command or Off Command get invoked as expected. Speaking a number, percent or colour do get passed to either command as a parameter as expected.

The voiceReply seems to be ignored by smart home devices and it always says "OK" unless you use the Alexa App setting to make a noise instead. Is there anyway to get the voice reply to work? I expect as you ignore the voice fields the answer is no 😞

btw I found a useful debugging tool is to add a start to my processing cmd file open a window. eg

start "" echo "[%1][%2][%3]"

That helped me fix an obscure reason some variables were not being expanded when the cmd was invoked from TRIGGERcmd but worked fine from the cmd shell.

Maybe the Runs could show the command return value and outputs to stdout and stderr to help debugging? But that would require more server storage I guess.

@Steve-Lee said in Multiple parameters:

doesn't work with a colour, just get error

but "alexa turn notepad green" gets notepad to open green.txt 🙂

@Steve-Lee, sure, I'll add those.

@Steve-Lee, thank you for doing that!