I am trying to understand how bond works so I can buy the fans that fit my needs. It appears that bond will work with the Hampton bay fans but I did not know how it would function with the simple remote that the ones i am interested in come with. The simple remote appears to have one button to control fan speed and will cycle through the speeds as you press the button. When this fan/remote is pared with Bond will it work the same? or will I be able to go directly to the Hi/med/low speed I want?
In nearly all cases, the Bond Bridge will just allow you to control the fan with the same commands as originally exist with the remote.
As in, if the original remote has a “High, Med, Low” then there are discrete signals the fan can receive for each of those speeds.
Fans that have a single “change speed” button would typically only have a signal for “change speed”.
That being said, some specific fans may store a speed in the remote and send a signal for whatever speed it is keeping track of itself.
Even rarer, I’d say, is the fan which has a receiver capable of understanding discrete “high, medium, low” commands even if the original remote didn’t have separate buttons and the remote also did not keep track itself of what speed it is on.
The short version: results may vary, at least out of the box.
With the community here, the staff (either through occasional appearances here or through support chat/email), and the official API + some sort of programmable smart home controller of your choice, there are a number of advanced options that could expand what is automatically available.
That is frustrating. The whole point of me looking in to bond was to be able to set the fan speed through my home automation system. Most of the fans i like have a simple remote with only one button to cycle through the speeds. It does not seem like a practical solution at if that is true…
Bond Bridges, if utilized as the exclusive means of control (directly, through official voice assistant integration, and/or through API integration with your own home automation system), would be able to track the speeds it believed to be true, and thereby be able to programmatically set whatever speed you wanted - even if the fan receiver does not have discrete speed signals.
For fans (or lights) without discrete codes for speeds or other functions, where toggle commands would therefore be used, mixed use of the original / “dumb” remote and a Bond Bridge / voice assistant / home automation system is a recipe for frustration (as Bridges don’t constantly “listen” for IR/RF signals in the background and wouldn’t know something has changed due to a “dumb” / original remote being used).
In any case, Bond Bridges cannot add new codes to a receiver and will only be able to leverage commands that the receiver can successfully interpret.
Think of a Bond Bridge as a Logitech Harmony remote - it is capable of sending commands which were on the original device remote, and can even send other commands as well! BUT, and this is the big ‘gotcha’, the device to which the Harmony remote is attempting to send the ‘extra’ commands MUST know how to receive and interpret them, for anything useful to happen.
I have some devices that have a “Source Toggle” only on the original remote, but happen to also have discrete “InputXYZ” commands that work with the device even though they’re not on the original remote.
Those are great to discretely power on and set inputs directly.
I have one or two other devices that have only the “Source Toggle” button on the remote and I’ve never been able to find discrete “InputXYZ” commands the device recognized over and above what the original remote had.
Those are really finicky about powering on and setting inputs as I desire.
IF AND ONLY IF the Harmony alone controls the inputs, and if the number of “source toggle” signals sent are correctly received, then it works beautifully. But if something goes wrong with one of the signals, or the device doesn’t respond, or someone pulls the original remote out of the drawer in which I hide them, all bets are off. Manually fixing the source so that Harmony’s assumptions and the device’s real world status agree is the only solution in those cases.
Make sense? Sorry I got long winded there.
It really depends on how the remote works. @residualimages is right that, unfortunately, it’s YMMV with these ceiling fan remotes. There’s hundreds of them out there, and new variations come out all the time. We don’t know every model of remote. (But if you send our support team a photo of front/back of remote, we can check if we know it.)
If the remote always sends the same signal that means “change speed”, then you will not be able to get directly hi/lo/med speed. It’s a mess.
But, it is actually quite likely that the remote internally keeps a speed counter and then cycles through sending signals that mean “set speed 1”, “…2”, or “…3”. In this case, you’re in business!