I have a Kichler fan with a wall control, plus a Bond that I tried configuring to control it.
The Bond does find a known remote and is able to control the fan. Here is the weird part — if I go from using the wall control to the Bond, most of the time the Bond will actually change the direction of the fan. I didn’t configure the winter mode or anything.
Thus far I’ve been unable to find an acceptable configuration to prevent this — ideas? Trying to manually program the Bond by recording the wall switch has its own issues as the light + fan go together and therefore I can’t independently control them.
Your fan uses what we call a “stateful” protocol, or “state remote”. The signals from the remote control (wall control or Bond) contain information like this:
The downside is, if you switch between Bond Bridge and the wall control, you will experience issues where the remote is sending outdated state information about the light when you’ve just tapped the speed button.
The upside is, the Bond Bridge is able to properly control the light and direction, because the protocol allows for precisely specifying the exact brightness or direction, rather than just having toggle signals as with many ceiling fan remotes.
If you want the fan in a particular direction, set that on the Bond app and don’t change it. The Bond shouldn’t reverse the direction if the direction setting on the app and the wall control are in sync.
Thanks much for the tips. I definitely understand the stateful concept, however I can not understand the fan reversal. Maybe since I’m using the remote configuration suggested by the Bond app, that configuration has a bug or something. Without any reversal configuration whatsoever the fan will change direction when switching between wall remote and Bond. I have zero insight into the suggested remote from the Bond, and so I have no idea how to debug that.
I can just manually record the wall remote signals, however then I’m back with a Bond configuration that will always set both the fan + light together – which is basically unusable. Like when I want to set fan to low in the middle of the night via app then the light will switch on.
Can I do any more in-depth programming / API work to solve this?
I don’t have a stateful remote, but I believe if you ONLY use the Bond Bridge, it will properly track (discretely/independently) the fan and the light once you get it synced once in the real world + app.
As in, in the middle of the night if you tell the Bond app (or use the Bond + smart assistant integration to do a voice command) to set the fan to Low, and it is currently on High spinning Clockwise and the light is Off, Bond would send the state command of fan to speed Low, Clockwise + light Off (keeping the light off and fan spinning Clockwise).
Now, I think that would require you using the original wall control to get the fan + light in the same state in the real world as the Bond app thinks the fan + light are, and then not using the wall control anymore, and exclusively using Bond.
This struggle with hybrid use of original device remotes / wall switches + the Bond Bridge isn’t unique to stateful remotes, but it definitely seems extra ripe for things to go wacky and get out of sync between original control and Bond extra dramatically.
This struggle is exactly why I use API-integrated (as in, using the Bond API) third party 8-button remotes, Harmony remote hacks, and/or in-wall switches/keypads to give physical controls to rooms that Bond is controlling the fan and light (the original fan remote is locked away in a drawer, never to be used again haha).