Any update on AC support?

Devices Air Conditioners
1

Just looking for an update on how to control my window mount AC unit.

2

Iā€™ll let the BOND / Olibra team answer from the official perspective, but I have personal curiosity if we (the customer community) could get something working in the meantime.

Do you know if your AC is IR or RF controlled? / AC make and model?

3

Its a Frigidaire RG15E/E-ELL1, that what is says on the remote anyway. and it is a IR.

4

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5

Our plan is to open up to community device templates that can be searched/shared. The issue with A/C is the staggering number of different protocols, and thereā€™s no good open database. We can change that!

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6

Until that rolls out, I can probably work with you here, Travis, to repurpose a manually recorded ceiling fan device to use (at least most of) your IR codes (see how I did that with a Dyson AM04) - though I donā€™t myself have the Frigidaire AC device so I wonā€™t be able to confirm if the steps work aside from your feedback.

Steps would be largely the same. Most important parts would be steps 4 and 5 from the top section (though you would likely use ā€œfan speed upā€ vs ā€œwinterā€ in step 4).

7

Thank you very much. I got a few of the buttons mapped:

Toggle - On and Off
Increase Speed - Temp Up
Decrease Speed - Temp Down
Summer - Heat
Winter - Cool
Breeze - Fan Only

But now i can only get Google to turn it on and off and it wont increase the Temp or modes? Is that just because it doesnā€™t translate to Google or did i set something wrong?

And if there is anything i can do to help with the Shared templates i would love to help.

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8

Iā€™ll lean on @marcio , @jacob , and @merck (or anyone else in the community side!) for notes on what they would expect to work via Google Assistant while in this sort of stopgap middle ground ā€˜solutionā€™. I primarily use my own control system and its hooks I manually create into Google vs the official BOND Google integration, and Iā€™d hate to lead you astray.

9

Making a great all-around UX for A/Cs will require a bunch more work on our end. You can use Bond Bridge as a generic IR blaster, but donā€™t expect it to work well with integrations outside of CF and Shades device types.

I realize in my last post I neglected to point out the other two reasons why we had not supported A/Cs yet: (A) Thereā€™s a fair bit of work required to make the various features of the A/C remotes accessible via Google Home/Alexa/SmartThings in the way youā€™d expect for A/C units, and totally unrealted to the rest of this post (B) the table-top form-factor of Bond Bridge makes it quite awkward to use for controlling IR A/C units.

Yes, you can assign things as if it were a Ceiling Fan, but then the expectations are different, so it appears to work differently. The proximate causes of not being able to control the ā€œspeedsā€ (temp) and ā€œmodeā€ (direction) are these:

  1. With just IncreaseSpeed and DecreaseSpeed actions, Bond Bridge does not know the max_speed and so is unable to fully populate the Speed feature to your device. Therefore it is not available via the integrations. We treat Speed as a monolithic feature, always expecting to support the user intent SetSpeed(n). ā€” Perhaps we could make our API behave a bit better here (like allowing max_speed to be patchable), but this would be unlikely to do what you need for the A/C unit.

  2. We currently do not support the Direction feature (setting Summer/Winter) via Google/Alexa/ST. This is simply a shortcoming in our integration code, but this gap has been given lower priority than some other things simply because within the context of ceiling fans, you tend to change direction 2x per year, and weā€™ve gotten very few complaints that this is missing from the voice integrations.

You may think, why can we not just support ā€œCustomā€ devices, and then just export those controls to Google/etc. rather than insisting on narrow device types? You see, without us going through all the different possible modes, temperatures, etc. and creating the appropriate interface code for Google/Alexa/ST, those integrations will not be able to support ā€œcustomā€ controls that youā€™ve added to a device. This is the main reason why we did not add custom controls via the app before, and why you cannot rename/edit the icons. Because while you would expect that the integrations would update to reflect the newly assigned behavior, it is really a very challenging problem. There are full-blown automation systems out there which allow a highly customizable export of a device to the various cloud integrations (GH/Alexa/ST), but those systems are a lot more complex than Bond Home and moreover they require a much higher level of sophistication on the part of the user/programmer. Our primary goal here is to make products that ā€œjust workā€ for the average consumer, while opening up as much of that platform as we can to the community to reduce the barriers to integration.

All that said, @Sgt_Shadow3600, I sincerely hope that we get shared templates going and open up the system more so that we can empower you here!

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10

Thank you so much. You all have been amazing help I really appreciate it. And i look forward to testing out the shared temples when they are available.

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