ASUS router script to control EcoBee themostat

[jsteinm1]

Not sure if this is the right place for this, but hopefully someone can point me in the right direction or at least let me know if my idea is possible before I sink a lot of time into it. I have an RT-AC87U running Merlin firmware. I recently installed an EcoBee3 thermostat. I'm thinking about setting the thermostat to "Away Mode" when none of our phones are connected to the wifi, and resuming the schedule when one phone is connected again. Is it possible to put a script like this on my router to send commands to my thermostat? Here is the API for the EcoBee https://www.ecobee.com/home/developer/api/documentation/v1/index.shtml

Thanks!

 

[Zirescu]

Can't speak directly to what you're trying, I'm still waiting for my Ecobee3 to arrive, but suspect you might have better luck using the IFTTT recipes and geofences.

 

[jsteinm1]

I looked a little at the Life360 app that IFTTT uses and I'm not a huge fan of it. I'm also concerned it will eat up a chunk of battery polling location data constantly (I keep GPS set to Device Only for this reason). I thought this would be a clean solution that doesn't impact my battery if it's possible.

The EcoBee is pretty awesome though, you'll like it.

 

[Zirescu]

So after doing some digging your request seems possible. I'm playing around with mine now, and put together some steps you'll need to perform ahead of time along with examples of how to communicate with the thermostat (via the ecobee servers).

1. Going to assume you've already created an ecobee user account.
2. You'll need to setup yourself as a developer through their portal here and accept their agreements.
3. Then login to the web portal for your ecobee and follow the steps outlined here to create and app and then get an authorization token.
4. Continue on with their examples to get the gist of things. You should be able to run the curl commands directly on the AC87U (I've got entware installed and I'm not 100% sure if you'll need it to run curl).

I've started some preliminary stuff based on their examples, hoping to have something hacked together later this weekend.

In case you haven't found it already there is this user forum on SmartHomeHub with some additional resources for the ecobee3.

 

[jsteinm1]

So after doing some digging your request seems possible. I'm playing around with mine now, and put together some steps you'll need to perform ahead of time along with examples of how to communicate with the thermostat (via the ecobee servers).

1. Going to assume you've already created an ecobee user account.
2. You'll need to setup yourself as a developer through their portal here and accept their agreements.
3. Then login to the web portal for your ecobee and follow the steps outlined here to create and app and then get an authorization token.
4. Continue on with their examples to get the gist of things. You should be able to run the curl commands directly on the AC87U (I've got entware installed and I'm not 100% sure if you'll need it to run curl).

I've started some preliminary stuff based on their examples, hoping to have something hacked together later this weekend.

In case you haven't found it already there is this user forum on SmartHomeHub with some additional resources for the ecobee3.

Awesome! I don't have a lot of experience with stuff like this, so I feel better knowing that it is plausible. I'll go though all this stuff and see what I can put together this weekend. I think this would be a nice alternative since those GPS apps aren't always that accurate or quick to update and I'm sure it drains battery.

 

[jsteinm1]

For anyone else interested in this setup... I never got around to figuring out how to set up the scripts to accomplish this. However, I did setup an UNRAID server which can run HomeAssistant (https://home-assistant.io/components/device_tracker.asuswrt/). This software can effectively interface between many routers and thermostats to do exactly what I was trying to do.