I recently purchased a Bond Bridge to control my ceiling fans and shades, and I’m looking to integrate it with Home Assistant for better automation. I’ve done some research and found that there’s a Bond integration available, but I’m running into some issues with setup.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
Installed the Bond integration via Home Assistant
Added my Bond Bridge using its IP address
Confirmed that the Bond app controls my devices without any problems
However, when I try to control the fans through Home Assistant, I’m seeing inconsistent behavior. Sometimes the commands go through instantly, while other times there’s a significant delay or nothing happens at all. I also noticed that Home Assistant isn’t always reflecting the correct state of my devices.
A few specific questions I have:
Has anyone else experienced lag or inconsistent device states with the Bond integration?
Would setting up a static IP for the Bond Bridge improve reliability?
Are there any recommended troubleshooting steps, such as resetting the Bond Bridge or re-adding devices?
Does enabling local control (instead of cloud) make a noticeable difference in response times?
While I can’t think of something specifically to solve your problems, reserving an IP address in your router for a device such as a Bond Bridge is always a good idea, so that any systems / devices that need to communicate with it, like HA, can rely on the IP address always being the same.
Bond is a one-way RF remote transmitter that clones signals from RF remote controls. You seem to describe features and not bugs of such a system. It can talk to your devices, but can’t listen.
In other words, your fans have no idea that Bond isn’t the same wireless remote it cloned. And that’s the point: it hacks “dumb” devices that can’t talk back. It works great for what it does. I could not control my fireplace through HA without it.
This is completely different than systems like Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Matter that handshake between device and bridge. In those, the devices are smarter and can transmit, so a) commands are reliable, because the bridge listens for acknowledgement and re-transmits as needed, and b) devices keep the bridge updated about their state (e.g., when when changed by another actor).
Anyway, the best way to definitively control device state in a one-way system is to hide all other remotes and stick to stateless commands (e.g., “high”, “low”, “off”, “on”) instead of stateful ones (e.g., “up”, “down”, “on/off”). With the former, you get what you ask for. But the latter commands will have unpredictable results because they depend on starting state–which you don’t know.
A quick word about "static IP"s: there’s a subtle but critical difference between a “static IP” (i.e., set on the device) and a “reserved IP” (i.e., set on the router). Avoid the former. The latter is sometimes helpful, but probably not necessary on the average home network. And is probably not your problem anyway if things work SOMETIMES. It’s unlikely that things rearrange every few minutes to cause intermittent problems. Most home routers run dnsmasq under the hood for a good reason–it’s tried and true and solid.