Master Channel versus Groups

Devices Shades & Blinds
1

I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts on the use of “master channels” versus Bond Groups for moving more than one shade/screen/louver motor with a single command.

Master Channels

The traditional way of creating a “group” of shades was to take an unused remote control channel and pair it to every motor that you wish to move with that “group”. Now, when you operate the “master channel” all the motors move, even though you did not operate them from the individual channel.

You can do this within the Bond app by creating a new “shade device” which you then proceed to pair to all the motors in the location or facade. You can just stay on the Pair screen and repeatedly hit the Pair button without accepting the “did the shade jog” question. You can also get back to the Pair button for an existing device in Device Settings > Advanced > Pair & Unpair.

Advantages

  • Shades all start to move at the same time. No popcorn effect.
  • Works with all integrations.
  • Works even with ancient Bond hardware from the iceage (Snowbird units with serial numbers starting A or B, with v2 firmware).

Disadvantages

  • when operating the master channel, Bond does not know what other devices in the app should have their states updated, so the states show wrong
  • does not work properly with the dead reckoned slider we have for RMS12 (Somfy RTS) and a few other technologies. Basically, if you have to set the course time with the wizard during setup to “calibrate your shade”, it will NOT work properly with a master channel.

Groups

The alternative to a master channel is to create a Group in the Bond Home app. This just takes a few taps.

Advantages

  • can mix different motor technologies in a single Group
  • motors still start together when supported by the underlying motor technology, such as ARC (Rollease) and Gaposa.
  • states of the member devices are updated when the group is controlled

Disadvantages

  • although documented on our open API, most integrations do not support our Groups feature, so you will not see it on your control system.
  • legacy motor technologies that lack channel bitmaps (such as RTS) still have popcorn effect*

Scenes

The best scenario is to set up a Group, and then include the Group in a Bond Scene.

Advantages

  • all the advantages of Groups
  • plus, supported by Alexa & Google Home
  • support on Control4 (and other pro integrations) is forthcoming

Disadvantages

  • you do need to create one scene for each Group action

(*) There is a way we could eliminate this by using a master channel inside the Group, but the complexity of setting this up just for legacy RF technologies never made sense for us.

1 Like
2

Having been user and commented on this forum of my use with grouping outside of Bond I like to add some further details which made me feel strongly of using that approach.
Advantages
There is only 1 quasi device that Bond needs to handle, hence the Pairing is a single step with the remote set to the master channel. This eliminates also issues reported by users with setting up grouping in Bond.
The limitation of # devices Bond can handle can be significantly improved by hiding redundantly operating devices from Bond and eliminating communication overload causing failures to operation multiple device in a single step.
The remote is always a working fallback that makes the operation much more reliable for any communication issues users are more often encountering. This is particular relevant if you have a larger scene of operations coded in a house integration environment.