In homekit I am not able to see any control other than a simple light bulb, ‘on/off’ switch. when i operate the light switch it appears as a dimmer slider however what does that control?
Is there a way to at least add fan and/or flame height to the mix? almost presenting as fan speed similar to how ceiling fans work with bond bridge & homekit?
@merck – I have a regular Bond Bridge and am trying to enable HomeKit support for Somfy Shades – however I only see Alexa, Google Assistant and SmartThings in Integrations and no mention of HomeKit under the bridge settings > Advanced Settings. Any pointers?
You’ll need the v4 firmware but it’s not out yet for BD-1000 Bond Bridge. Working thru an issue with the chip vendor. It is available now on Bond Bridge Pro BD-1750.
I have the new 4.x beta firmware and HomeKit is working great with my Somfy RTS roller shades!
Do you know if there’s a way to trigger the shades to scroll to the “favorite” position that’s pre-programmed via the ‘my’ button? Would asking Siri to set the shades to 50% accomplish that?
You can just specify the % that you want. I think you can do this via our forever-beta HomeKit integration.
Note that for the special case of RTS, the Hold and Preset actions send the same RF signal. So you could also use the Hold action (“Stop”) if it be exposed on your integration.
Thanks @merck. I am using the Bond Bridge beta HomeKit integration and controlling the shades via the Apple Home app. I have 3 shades grouped together. In some scenarios a single shade gets moved (e.g. when a specific window open sensor is triggered), and there is also a separate RTS remote, so the open % state that Bond Bridge / HomeKit is aware of is often incorrect so the set to specific % command doesn’t work reliably.
Given this, I want to be able to send the Hold / Preset action via HomeKit / Bond Bridge, which will always return all three shades to their preset position; for me this is a partially open state. Is this possible via the HomeKit integration? I only see the % slider. In the Bond app, I see the slider and the ‘My’ button – I guess triggering the ‘My’ button is what I’m looking for in Apple Home.
As a side note, I believe that Bond Bridge is unaware of the preset position even when it sends the Hold / Preset command itself, as the preset position is programmed directly into the shades. Is there a way to inform Bond Bridge of this preset position so it’s open % state is updated accurately after Hold / Preset is sent?
This does correctly send the relevant Hold signal and cause the shades to move to their preset, so long as they are not already moving. The slider in this integration doesn’t work properly however, I think due to this bug which you have also commented on @merck – which is what led me to try out the new beta Homekit integration that’s built into Bond now.
Would exposing the Hold action in a similar way to the homebridge-bond plugin make sense? It would solve for the scenario where the various shades are in an inconsistent open state relative to what the Bond device knows about, which happens when a physical remote or other service that Bond doesn’t know about moves their position. I appreciate this is all accounting for the lack of RTS being able to report open state, but that’s most Somfy shades I believe.
Also to re-iterate something I mentioned before, not specific to Homekit – when the ‘My’ button is pressed in the Bond app control for a shade, the Hold action (“Stop”) is sent to the shade so it moves to the shade-defined preset. But Bond doesn’t know what this is, so the shade is always in an inconsistent state. That might be something worth addressing in the Bond integration itself.
It’s a good idea, and we’ve talked about this, but currently there’s no way to do it. I suppose we could have a preset_position property that would let an advanced user inform the Bridge of where the preset (favorite) is at. Would you mind using the API to set that (and then going forward Preset would adjust the % on the UI/API automatically)?
