Currently I only see that there are 2 actions available: on or off. Would you be offering actions for controlling light/fan separately as well as fan speeds.
It would be nice to say “Alexa, set fan speed to high” or “Hey Google, increase fan speed”
In Alexa today you can say “Alexa, set Living Room Fan to 70%”, or “Alexa, increase Living Room Fan by 10%”.
Unfortunately “set speed to high” is not supported by Alexa Smart Home API at this time.
Control of fan speed with Google Home and IFTTT control is in the works!
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Thanks for letting me know. I have linked it with Amazon Echo, but never used it as I moved to Google Home primarily. While the percentage seems to work on Echo, there is no change to the speed if say I increase by 10%. This is because the fan controller only has 3 discrete speeds. Would it be possible to expose each level as a different switch in Echo or have it similar to scenes in Philips Hue? I wrote the device handler for Hampton Bay Zigbee controller in SmartThings and I exposed the speeds as different switches and it works great with Google Home, Amazon Echo & IFTTT/Stringify etc.
Good point about the 3 discrete speeds. The way the BOND Alexa integration works is, we keep track of the current speed number rather than the current “percentage”, since as you point out, the speed is the true state of the fan motor. If you request a specific percentage value (SetPercentage in Alexa terminology), then we assign the closest speed, rounding up. So 1% --> speed 1, 90% --> speed 3. If you ask to “increase percentage”, a request to increase by even just 1% results in a jump to the next speed. Because after all, the request is to “increase” the fan.
As for exposing each level, that sort of fine-grained control will certainly be possible using our Public API or probably via SmartThings integration. I’m really excited about those coming out within a few months.
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@merck Alexa appears to no longer (did it ever?) support increase or decrease. I tried, e.g., “Alexa, increase ceiling fan speed,” “Alexa, increase ceiling fan,” and “Alexa, increase ceiling fan by 10%.” The first two get a “bee-donk” but no commands sent by the Bond Bridge and no change in the speed number. The third gets a “Ceiling fan doesn’t support that.” This was true with 2.10.21 as well as the latest 2.11.2 firmwares.
Asking “Alexa, set ceiling fan to 50%” or “Alex, set ceiling fan speed to 4” appears to work.
(Holymoly this forum has existed for more than 2 years. How did that happen.)
We absolutely are supposed to support increase/decrease speed and light via Alexa. And, I can confirm that I see the same problem as you are reporting. These are both problems with our Alexa integration code.
I don’t have an ETA for the increase/decrease Alexa fix.
May I ask why you want to use increase/decrease via Alexa, rather than asking for specific speeds or percentages?
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My wife doesn’t (and never will, God love her) speak to Alexa in a logical fashion. So, telling her she must ask for a particular speed number, or even a particular percentage, may not ever “take,” as it were. She will likely try things like “Alexa, turn down the ceiling fan” or “Alexa, turn the ceiling fan speed up.” To the extent that Alexa can interpret those as increase or decrease commands with a default increment/decrement, it would be nice to have the Alexa integration to support it. Today, I have Increase and Decrease speed number by 1 mapped to buttons on a Insteon Keypad by her bed.
But she probably would also be fine with “Alexa, set the ceiling fan to <Low/Medium/High>” if that works as well.
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