Is "cover: stop" not supported by Alexa Smart Home Skill?

Hi,

I have a doubt about how the Alexa Smart Home Skill handles the cover.stop_cover service and if it can handle such case at all, because in the relevant documentation it just speaks about of the open/close and set_position services, but doesn’t mention the stop_cover service.

With stop_cover I mean the ability to stop che cover midway during the raising/lowering cycle, that will result in the cover to be in the state open, albeit with the position attribute being <100.

I’ve successfully integrated the Alexa Smart Home Skill in my HA and my covers works fine. I can successfully say open/raise, close/lower and stop cover, but I think the latter command is just a lucky coincidence: my cover device will stop if any commands is issued when they are already moving (e.g. when the cover is opening, if I send the command open, the cover will stop).

So why I am “complaining”? Well I always had the impression that the stop command was working oddly and recently I was looking at the logbook to look what happens when cover are actioned by Alexa: it turn out that when I utter the command open or close the logbook will report to have used ModeController/SetMode, while when I utter the command stop the logbook will report instead PowerController/TurnOff which sounds off.

image

The voice commands issued to Alexa are spoken in Italian, so translation issue may be involved (I won’t say “Alexa, stop cover” which would be mouthful in Italian, but I’ll say “Alexa, ferma tapparella”.

So my question is: how I can get the full log of the command issued by Alexa to HA? What SetMode
is set to? Which serviced are called by each Alexa command?

(my covers do not support set_position so I can’t use any utterence that relies on RangeController, i.e. "Alexa, set cover to 50% would not work)

That is the full log and that is the command. You’re thinking to much into this. That’s the command that is sent from Alexa to home assistant. Home assistant is logging it. SetMode is not called, PowerController/TurnOff is called.

You’re welcome to try and debug into the actual json, but it’s not going to tell you anything else that’s useful for this situation. It’s going to have a bunch of other stuff like header, payload, and scope. Essentially a bunch of guids and auth tokens along side the command being issued… whcih you already know as PowerController/TurnOff.

I did a clean test and can confirm that SetMode log is when I said to alexa to close the cover, where the TurnOff match when I said to stop.

Ah! I think I found the smoking gun!

  1. I’ve issued command to open cover
  2. State of cover is changed to ‘opening’ as it should be
  3. I’ve issued command to stop
  4. State of cover change to ‘closing’ when it should have been changed to ‘open’ (in phisical world the cover has stopped)

So that’s it, I think. Alexa is trying to shut down the cover when I ask to stop it, and HA interpret the command as ‘close’, but for a lucky coincidence instead I get the result that I want. Eventually the cover will fix its state to ‘open’ when the next sensor update occur (it’s based on a modbus integration).

This explain the weird behavior I sometimes got when trying to be clever with my automations.

It would be nice to have confirmation from a English speaker so to rule out the lost in translation possible cause.