Is it possible to have the Bond Bridge Pro wait until it receives a response from all ‘triggered’ devices before moving them? I have 16 Somfy RTS blind motors all setup within Bond Home app as individual blinds; per the programming of the blinds from the company I contracted to build and set them up…I have no problem with this. Unfortunately if you’re familiar with Somfy and the Telis 16 RTS remote, this means that I need to buy another one if I wish to get additional channels to group the blinds and move them in parallel (channels 17-32)… not really a fan of having to buy another remote just to set them up as groups and then pipe into the Bridge app and never get the remote out again.
Since I’m using the Homekit app (via homebridge) for controlling the blinds, moreso than with the Somfy remote or the Bond App themself, I have scenes/groups. One example I can use is a group that contains two blinds. The grouping function works a treat in homekit which I suppose is by design from Apple. However, when triggered the blinds drop at different times…ie when Group A is triggered (which contains blind X and Y), Blind X will start moving, then after a brief second, Blind Y will start moving. The resulting effect is about a 1 inch gap between the blinds which annoys members of my household…
I want to see if theres a way I can either group them in the bond app OR have a way I can program/modify the Homebridge app to listen for a response from the blinds as from what I can tell, they send a response to the Bridge saying something like “hello we’re now moving, you can move on to the next device” and then when the two blinds send that response, the Bridge sends the final execution command or they just send.
@merck You’re an absolute legend! The blinds now successfully move as a paired group! Thats awesome that I didn’t need to buy another remote just to achieve this!! I didn’t even think to verify what Somfy told my supplier and by extension me.
Thanks a bunch mate!
[Edit]: Before I forget, is there an approx delivery date for when the virtual groups will hit the Bond App? Mainly just because of the fact that since I’ve done this and now the blinds are grouped as virtual shades, the non-grouped blinds need to be removed from the Homekit status window because they don’t report when theyve been closed/opened and they also report as being a different blind. A caveat of getting this working…win some you loose some ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You put your finger on the key reason why we need a Group feature, and the ability to elect a (hidden) device as a “master channel”. — It’s not going to be like, tomorrow. But it is important to us, and we will let you know when there’s a beta available.
I presume this virtual “grouping” feature adds a device to the Bond Bridge device limit? I have ordered a second Bond Bridge for grouping purposes, but because of the number of shades I have RTS channel group is pushing me over the limited. I guess I would get no relief from that using this virtual workaround?
Hi Harry, thanks for the question about RTS and Groups.
I have RTS channel group
Sounds like you are currently creating additional RTS shades in the Bond Home app and pairing to all physical shades in one location. We refer to this as a “master channel”. Indeed that approach consumes an additional device on the Bridge, but has the advantage that all shades move together as they receive just a single “master” signal.
If you group together RTS shades, as of now they will move in a staggered fashion, with ~1sec delay between each shade starting to move. This grouping is virtual, and does not consume an additional device on the Bridge.
We are in the process of doing additional testing to determine the capacity of the Bridges with respect to number of devices, schedules, and groups. I’m thinking we could market some sensible limits and then also give a % capacity indication in the app for each Bridge, so you can see how loaded it is. Anyways that’s just an idea at this point.
If I am not mistaken, running the same scenario with 5 RTS shades, there is no need for all shades to be in bond bridge but only the virtual group shade, so you would actually not overload the limit on the bond bridge. Having all shades in bond would enable individual control if that is desired.
