Fan Light temperature and dimming control

Devices
1

Hey all!
I have the following fan:
Store: Home Depot
Brand: Home Decorators Collection
Product Name: 60in Driskol Smart Ceiling Fan

FCC ID of the remote: 2AQZU-18028
RF Frequency: 304.25
Documentation: Fcc.report

[hr]

I’m not a fan of the included hubspace app (no local control) and it doesn’t play nice with Home Assistant either so I am trying to replace it with a Bond Bridge for the main control source.

I have managed to register the following commands:
Light power on, light power off, fan speeds 0-5 and reverse fan control (have not checked if reverse fan control can be split into summer/winter control).

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Thus far the bond bridge seems like a better RF remote than the one that came with the fan, so I’m already a fan. Better in the sense that the fan is more responsive to the bond bridge than it is to the remote (sometimes it misses the remote commands and I have to click it multiple times to get it to work).

Where the bond bridge is falling short is on dimming control, I can’t seem to find a way to record the light dimming command from the remote.

I know the fan has discrete positions for light dimming levels, but the remote only cycles through them when the light button is held down. This would still be acceptable as the solution. When adding the remote originally, I did see a couple of “found” remotes in the database that had dimming features and I think one of them had the right implementation for dimming (where the fan cycled through dimming levels while the app held the signal until I clicked the button again) but other portions of those templates were just broken (fan control or light on/off switching). I figured I’d be able to record the dimming signal but I cannot seem to find the option to record that. Am I missing something?

Next, the fan allows for the light temperature to be toggled through a button. It has 6 discrete temperatures (2700K, 3000K, 3500K, 4000K, 5000K, 6500K) but I believe the signal from the remote just cycles through the temps and doesn’t necessarily have a different message for each temperature. Thus far, I mapped this to the “toggle bottom light” and it seems to work as expected. I was wondering if there was another toggle that wasn’t trying to track an on/off state that I could leverage for this.

I am using a V1 ‘snowbird’ bond bridge so I know there won’t be any more firmware updates beyond what is already on the device so I am hoping to work within the confines of what is available or may e something that could be done on the app side.

Hopefully I’ve provided enough information for you guys to help me out!

Thanks!
PXSS

2

One thing I’ve done, at least temporarily, when a Template is found that does something I need but doesn’t work for all things (as in I have to ‘raw record’ some commands), I will keep both devices. I remove or don’t record the commands that are served by the other.

Hacky? A bit.
But if it lets me do the things… I don’t mind as much.

Now, that being said, dimming can be hard to automate – depends on if the Templates found in the database are just cycle dimming, or if they have the discrete brightness levels.
You can see a very old version I did here with Commands, before Bond gave us Actions in the API to abstract away some of the complexity.
(Spoiler alert: both Commands and Actions still work to call.)

If you really get down to it, you can make nearly any device have any kind of buttons; perhaps looking at Unable to learn dyson remote could give you some ideas for solutioning the light temperature commands?

I often have two or three devices in the Bond app I’m tinkering with for one real world single device, until I have my end state as good as I feel I can reasonably get into one or (very occasionally) two long-term devices.

3

Do you know if templates are modifiable? Could I start with the template of the remote with the working dimming control and re-record light on/off and fan speeds to have it all under a single device?

4

Well, for Templates we can REMOVE commands if we want, but we cannot modify or add:

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5

Thanks. Saved me some time going down that rabbit hole.

From what I think I’m understanding from the Dyson thread you linked, we can use cURL commands through windows to modify the buttons and such that appear for devices in the app? If I understand, devices are actually child features of the bond bridge and not actual entities of their own? Which is why we can modify device buttons via curl commands for the bridge?

I think I have a lot of reading to do on the API to better understand what exactly I’m communicating with when using curl commands

6

You can use cURL through any device that supports it (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc) – or you can use Postman or anything else which can generate HTTP requests (various API commands specify to use POST, DELETE, PATCH, PUT, or GET).
Not making any assumptions about your comfort level with those things, but if any of them are unknowns or scary, this community can help guide you through the pieces.
There is also a command-line utility which the Bond team periodically will remind us about, which can simplify some things, especially while familiarizing yourself with the Bridge / API. This would likely only be quickly useful if you happened to be a Linux user.

Bond Bridges make child entities, or “Devices”, under themselves which are just virtual representations of RF (or IR, for those Bridges that have it) commands / signals.
Smart By Bond enabled devices are actual real-world devices, but in the API / automation world, each is exposed to the Bond app as an individual entity / “Device” (without any Bridge being the ‘parent’ or prerequisite).

Did that clarify anything or answer most of your questions?

Oh: bonus thing. Sometimes you can take the Signal endpoint, which is a bunch of hex, from one Device and basically push it onto another Device via the API (using cURL / Postman / etc).
However, not all Template Devices expose their raw Signal, so that may or may not be useful to you in the end. (When Merck says “one-click devices” in that post, he means Template devices)
The Template I showed above, for instance, has no Signal data stored when I query it with the API. :frowning:

Second bonus: since you’re an iPhone user, in addition to cURL and Postman options on computers, you could use iOS’s “Shortcuts” feature to make quick buttons to directly issue your Bond Bridge some instructions over API (while your phone is on the same network as the Bridge), without even opening the Bond app each time.
More of a learning tool or niche usage case, but worth poking at perhaps?

1 Like
7

This definitely helps. I currently setup the fan how you suggested with two devices, one to control the dimmer and one for everything else.

Ultimately the front end for all of this will be Home Assistant or Homekit (through Home Assistant). The bond bridge is mainly a tool for me to integrate “dumb” fans into HA. So it doesn’t matter as much if its “hacky” on the back end, as long as I can tie it all together when it comes to the front end, it won’t trigger the OCD too much…

Anyways, thanks for all of the knowledge. It’ll definitely help when I start throwing it all together in HA. I’m excited to be able to finally control fans around the house without having to fight my wife for who should keep the remotes on their side of the bed…

8

one last thing before I sign off for the night:
You’ll find my (and others’) pretty strong recommendations that the answer to that battle is “no one gets the [OEM] remotes” if any of the commands (lights / fans) are power-toggle based – as in, do not have separate ON and OFF buttons on the original remote. :rofl: Don’t be fooled by what you see in the Bond app if it shows a separate button for On and Off – if the original remote didn’t have separate buttons, it’s a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors show within the Bond app.
There are also elements of “Trust State” that can be chosen by you to come into play (or not) for fan light kits, but which, in any case, do not apply to the fan itself.
if you want links to some of those discussions, we can provide – you may have already scrolled around enough to see 'em though.

9

EZPZ once I can add all of the fans to HA, I won’t have a problem convincing the wife to get rid of the OEM remotes. They’ll get replaced with scene controllers of some sort customized to each of us.

Oddly enough the remote for the fan in the OP above has a single button for on/off and you’d assume it was toggle based but it’s actually an on command and off command tied to the same button (which kind of makes the whole “having to click the remote an odd number of times for the light to finally turn on” situation make sense but is still silly)

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10

Yeah this is a long-standing limitation. Dimming requires the Bridge to understand how to send packets the fan understands, in a train of arbitrary length. When you raw record, Bridge just captures 600 ms and plays it back. No way to “hold down the button”.

You could theoretically study the hex contents and build yourself a dimmer button. Could be a cool Python script for a motivated individual. But it’s something we haven’t done here though we’ve talked about it.