Raising again - is it too much to ask for a simple reply? I see nothing in this thread or others around the ecobee plugin that indicates there is an awareness of the pending token change in the API
Just asking, is anyone working on this as if not, all ecobee plug-ins will become disabled on 12/1 when ecobee implements the new API
If EZLO is sponsoring the rebuild of this plugin, bravo. My intent here is not to criticize but to be aware and make plans. I have 4 of these in use at vacation rentals and will need to make arrangements if these are going offline in a week. Thanks
The pending changes on the Ecobee API should not affect the functionality of the plugin and authentication service. The callback_uri already uses the https:// prefix and the access/refresh tokens are stored in Vera variables thus 7 KB will fit in a variable along with the hyphens, underscores and commas.
As for the invisible device, yes, the plugin creates an invisible device that is the parent of all the other devices of the plugin and is used to store the access/refresh tokens commonly used by the other devices. It has no other purpose that’s why it is invisible.
After the account linking (via the wizard when it will be launched or via the steps described by Sorin) the Ecobee devices will be automatically synced and will appear on the UI.
Excellent, thank you very much for the reply. I suspect this will not be the case for the Watou-originated plugin many of us are still using and thus will prompt a quick migration here shortly to the new plugin. Stand-by for support requests!
Removed the original ecobee plugin and installed the 1.2 plugin on VeraSecure running latest firmware. Loaded fine, followed login link from post #12 above. Plugin found all 3 Ecobee 5th gen thermostats and at least initially seemed to be able to connect and receive temp and status updates. Noticed very quickly that any attempt in Vera to set status etc did not result in any change at the thermostat. After restarting, rebooting, logs indicate a http 500 error when attempting to connect to ecobee (Internal Server error) and a 400 Bad Request error when the plugin attempts to connect to the api provider. System is avail if support would like to debug.
I installed version 1.3 today which I thought was supposed to resolve the issue of the app not detecting certain models, still no luck adding my Ecobee 3 Lite on my Vera Plus with the latest firmware.
This app is so very broken, if an amateur can create a working plugin (although seemingly no longer updated and a little buggy) why cant a company that claims to be in the home automation business easily create one.
I have installed version 1.3 and successfully followed the 3 steps from Sorin.
I have generated the URL and when i look at the Ecobee portal, it shows that i have enabled
Vera Smart Home Controller
Developed by eZLO Innovation.
Unfortunately, the Vera system does not show any of my 3 thermostats.
My thermostats are all the original Smart Thermostats from about 7 years ago.
Did anyone have success with this type of thermostat?
Updated to 1.3…on the VeraSecure, current firmware, 3 Ecobee 5 thermostats. Good progress. Connection errors are gone, link to ecobee thermostats and ecobee.com appears stable after 48+ hours. Changes to thermostats appear in Vera, temperatures, humidity, occ sensors all working as expected. One area that still has an issue is the connection between Vera, the Ecobee portal (as expressed thru their iOS app or website) and the thermostat.
Change initiated on Thermostat is reflected in App and in Vera
Change initiated on App is reflected on Thermostat and Vera
Change initiated on Vera is reflected on App but NOT on Thermostat.
It’s as though the Vera plugin does not have write permissions on the Ecobee portal. This is consistent across all three thermostats. Hopefully just a permissions issue to enable. I looked and there’s no permissions associated with the Apps setting on the Ecobee portal. I do note that Ezlo instance has as perms " * Be able to control and modify ecobee device settings." only where as Amazon includes settings for this string as well as “Allow offline access” and also settings to control location.
Good progress, thanks for the focus on this plugin. I have a 3rd gen Ecobee in another home i plan to test next week, will advise. It is approx 4 years old.
Great to see progress being made on an official plugin for Ecobee. May I suggest perhaps also resurrecting support (without patches) for the RedLink RF gateway - this interfaces with both Honeywell and Mitsubishi HVAC products. Just a suggestion, as this is another highly available product from major retailers - ie, Home Depot, Lowes, etc.
I was running Rafale77’s plugin until this morning when it seems that the API finally kicked me off with no communication. I have not tried going back to Watou’s plugin. I am not going to attempt to troubleshoot them further (the API token issues were enough to annoy me while it did work most of the time).
Edit: Took a bunch out as it is now working. I DID have the problems people noted above, in that the wizard did not display after authentication with ecobee (when it finally started working - it seems to have been a networking issue between me and the ISP or Ecobee - not the fault of Vera at least), anyhow, what was nice, is everything automatically just started up. I did not have to add a thermostat, it all just showed up.
However, what is missing is the ability to set modes. This is crucial. “Away”, “Home” and most importantly “Sleep” are common to all ecobee models (you can’t set sleep from the panel, but it does work via the API).
Edit #2: The system throws an alert when a remote sensor goes into “unoccupied” mode and another when back out. I am getting “your device is no longer communicating” constantly, until I walk in front of it then Vera realizes it is still there and then tells me it is responding again. I assume this is a timeout somewhere, but I am not seeing where to do this in the settings.
Yep. Here’s my update after playing around a bit more:
If you’re in Vera and you operate the thermostat control (Auto, Heat, Cool, Off) and you have multiple thermostats, all the thermostats on the account with Ecobee are changed. Not just the one where the change was applied
Still some gap exists with permissions somewhere. Changes activated on Vera show up on the Ecobee all immediately but never show up on the physical thermostat. I haven’t tested this thoroughly by checking all three as one is remote, but there’s a gap
I too am seeing some kind of drop behavior where I am receving Vera alerts about the thermostat device going offline, and then back online. Seems random, haven’t correlated but yes may be to some occupancy issue.
My other ecobee which is on the “original” waout plug-in hasn’t crashed yet so I’ll probably put that one back in for now.
Offer is out to Ezlo, if you’d like to test with my VeraPlus and 3 ecobees, it’s a vacant rental right now and I’m here on site to test if needed.
I have finally been able to get the Ecobee lite to show up in Vera but it does not work properly.
I can change modes successfully, turn it from heat to cool to off and back.
When I try to change the temperature up or down it goes directly to the lowest temperature which is 7.5 degrees Celsius. Clicking up and down to any temp it stays at 7.5. I added a temp change to some scenes and same issue.
ex. when away set to 13 degrees and it still goes to 7.5. My home scene should change it back to 20 degrees but it stays at 7.5
Basically the only working control I have is turning it off and on.
I just replaced my Nest with an Ecobee5 (I had Ecobees prior to Nest, ultimately realized Nest just wasn’t as good as Ecobee, even though they look nicer on the wall). In any event, I attempted to install and use the new Ecobee plugin, and then found this thread. What’s not clear to me from the later postings is if others actually got this to work as it should.
My VeraPlus is on latest firmware. I’ve got 1.3 of the plugin installed. Still not seeing an Ecobee entry in the devices list. So, I followed the directions earlier in the thread to manually generate an authorization URL, but when I then attempt to access that authorization URL, I’m getting an “Invalid Credentials” response. It seems others, even with this manual method, were able to get farther than I, so would appreciate any guidance I may have missed.
I have to echo the sentiments of several posters…how did this plugin even get into the apps list in this state?
UPDATE: In conjunction with my original post above, I contacted Tech Support, and got a response overnight. While these instructions are similar to those provided near the top of this thread, I thought I’d re-post, as these were easier to follow and actually worked for me…
The process to authorize the Ecobee plugin has changed some time ago. The instructions are a little bit technical:
Log in to your account at home.getvera.com and connect to your controller.
Go to “Apps” → “Install Apps” → search for “EcoBee” → install the plugin "Ecobee Thermostat (by eZLO.) "
Right-click on the WebUI and select “Inspect Element .”
Go to the “Network tab” on the emerging window and wait for a "data_request? " packet to come up.
Right-click on the “data_request?” packet and select “Open in a new tab.”
Delete everything after “data_request?” on the URL and replace it for "id=lr_get_ecobee_auth_url"
The URL should look something like this if you’re connected locally:
The page will show you a link you must click to get to the authentication page. Follow that link to get to the Ecobee authentication form.
Log in with your Ecobee credentials and grant the required permissions.
The Ecobee thermostats should start appearing on the controller WebUI within 5 minutes.
So, I now have the new plug-in working successfully with my Ecobee5 thermostat, although I would echo one of the posts above in asking for the addition of Thermostat Mode functionality (i.e. Home/Away). Simply changing a temp or turning the thermostat on/off, for me at least, is not useful. When I leave my weekend home, I want to be able to put the thermostat into Away mode (and hold) and, ideally, reset the Away comfort setting temps (this home is in the desert, so I keep the AC on when the house isn’t occupied, but at a much higher setpoint, just to keep the house from getting too hot inside). That would allow me to fully integrate my HVAC functionality into my home automation routines for setting up/shutting down the house. Until/unless that functionality becomes available in the plug-in, I’ll still have to manage the thermostat separately for my comings & goings, which is a bummer.
Reading this thread makes me want to steer clear of the (ezlo in-house) ecobee plugin, since I’ve been using the original one by @watou with great success for years now, and would hate to hit any roadblocks that break my workflows (mostly Reactor automations).
But I’m keeping an open mind by asking my fellow ecobee thermostat users still on Vera:
HAVE YOU MADE THE SWITCH to ezlo’s ecobee plugin?
Are there any remaining bugs to be worked out?
Has it continued functioning 100% under 7.32 firmware?
Could you maybe take a screenshot of how the ezlo Ecobee plug-in looks? I’m rather astonished that it lacks the (very) basic Home/Away/Sleep/Vacation functionality expected here.
Does it create child devices for each remote sensor (Temp and Motion)? Capture messages sent from the ecobee thermostat? Allow setting Heat Setpoint and Cold Setpoint as well as just plain “Current Setpoint” (regardless of mode) separately?
The Plugin was working in 7.31, it does retrieve the Temp and Motion sensors from the original account, it should allow changing the heat and cool setpoint as well as the Current Setpoint.
It continues to work on 7.32, however, if any bugs appear they will be fixed.
I think I’ll wait until they at least add “Home/Away/Sleep” functionality to the ezlo ecobee plug-in before I try it. Not to mention the entire Auth process (reliable as it may be) sounds entirely too cumbersome for mainstream usage.
In other words, it will have to accomplish at least as much as the old ecobee plug-in by @watou / @rafale77 before it qualifies to replace my entire thermostat workflow. And be just as straightforward to install.
I just loaded this up to connect my ecobee4. I have the same results as Patrick_Beauchemin.
Are there some tweaks in the settings, or other action needed to have these devices?
My main interest is to put the HVAC system in an away mode when Vera is told we are away.
Seems like the bugs described in this thread haven’t been fixed in the latest version (1.3), I’m experiencing a major bug where if I change the set temperature for one of my ecobee thermostats all others update to the same temperature. this obviously makes this plugin a dead end for me since I maintain different temperatures in each room of my house.
Is there a solution for this? Or is this just a known issue and I have to wait for a patch?
In the mean time I’m using the other no-longer supported ecobee plugin, but I’m hoping the ezlo version works soon since it doesn’t seem like the other plugin is useful long term due to it using an oauth token which will expire in a year.
