Somfy blinds FUBAR'd

Devices Shades & Blinds
#1

I’ve been controlling 2 somfy binds (bedroom and living room) without for months. Today, they just stopped working, either by the app, or by Google Home voice command. My Bond still controls a fan without issue.

I have tried:

  1. syncing my Google Home devices - no change
  2. power cycling the Bond - no change
  3. re-pairing the bedroom blind - this is a mess:

  • since the blind doesn’t respond at all, I can’t first unpair it, but have to remove it as step 1. Not sure what impact that has, leaving behind a ‘ghost’ blind, but presumably not a great one

  • I got to the stage where the app asks me to press the (un)pair button; I do so and, joy, the blind successfully jogs. But then when I go to test the blind functions in the app, it starts controlling BOTH bedroom and living room blind at the same time, even though the channel on the Somfy remote was set appropriately

  • I cancel out of the process, double-check the remote channel, and try again; the bedroom blind jogs, so I move on to testing the app controls. Now ONLY the living room blind moves, not the bedroom one.

So @merck, @jacob, and others… Was anything pushed out to the bridges today to cause this? What can I do to rectify it? How can I remove the ‘ghost’ blind?

Thank you!

#2

If the receiver remembers twelve paired remotes, it’ll reject further pairing unless it’s factory reset, which is basically a special power cycle.

The last change to the Bond Bridge’s Somfy implementation was in January, and it was purely cosmetic. The last public release of any firmware was in February, if you’re in the Beta program: 3 weeks ago.

So I don’t think it’s related to a recent upgrade.

This sounds like an issue we patched in October. Remotes had a not-insignificant chance to be created with the same address. There’s also an internal counter for each remote, and when these counters coincide, the next remote used “wins” because the receiver tracks the higher counter. This’d result in one remote taking over two receivers, and the other remote not having any control, since its counter lags behind.

Once we discovered this it was immediately patched, so I’d be surprised if you’re experiencing this (unless you didn’t upgrade since October?), but it could be something along those lines.

If you PM me your Bond Bridge’s serial, I’d be happy to take a look and see if it’s this same “duplicate address” problem again.

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#3

The fact that they both stopped working makes me think it’s not the old “duplicate address” problem. I’ve got to think more on what this could be…

#4

Thanks for the speedy reply, @jacob.

I’ve got it pretty much fixed now:

  • firstly, it seems that my firmware was out of date. I’m sure when I looked earlier today there was no notification about this, and in general I’m pretty good at staying on top of software changes. But I guess not in this case! So I updated to 2.10.21, saw various UI changes (‘up’ became ‘open’ with a new icon etc)

  • I think when I was trying to re-pair today I messed up my somfy channels, so that was my fault, unrelated to the Bond, and I corrected that eventually

  • I RE-re-paired (having to remove both blinds without being able to unpair first), and it seems like both are working fine now

So the outstanding question is still why both blinds became unresponsive to the Bond simultaneously, and without any obvious event occurring. Not sure when I last successfully used the Bond to control the blinds rather than the remote, but it was very recently - yesterday for sure if not today.

I can still PM you details of the device if that would help with troubleshooting?

Thanks again

1 Like
#5

Great!

Yeah, send them on over and I’ll investigate whether or not anything looks out of place.

#6

Serial number sent! Thanks again!

#7

Similar problem for me, but worse, all four shades stopped working two weeks ago. Firmware v2.15.8.

I can not unpair them, they fail to jog when I hit the unpair operation. I can not pair them for a fresh device, they jog when I hit pair, but right after that the controls do not work just as before. Bond blinks sending it’s code.

This all happened sometime after weeks of the Bond continuously firing. It was going through a cycle of a request, followed by the Bond going offline, returning, and then request being honored starting the cycle all over again. I could not use my somfy remote, I was fighting the Bond hub. I could not use the Somfy app, it could not access the hub. That has settled down, then this happened.

I have a fan on the Bond, it still work just fine throughout all of this, it is totally just the Bond Somfy interface only.

Bond technical support has been no help. Ticket has been open all this time and they are ghosting me right now.

I assume I need a firmware update, I have the latest.

#8

@jacob - if you happen to be checking the forums, do you have any Somfy + Bond advice for @salyzyn?

#9

The fix was pain itself, took a whole day.

Summary, a deep factory reset :frowning:

[TL;DR]

I removed all devices, then explicitly factory reset the Bond Hub from application, and then again from the reset button. Took me a while to find the right incantations to acquire the correct remote pairings for everything else, discovered that if I used the 1hr button on one of my fans, it came up correct (well, gave me four choices, one appeared close), but not on any of the other buttons. Stuff like that. Anyways, the four Somfy drapes managed to pair correctly with that completely reset Bond Hub. There just appears there is no incremental way to fix this, or repair the pairings.

I really hope I never have to do this again, 4 months it worked +/- AWS outages, then carped out.

Doing this is not easy for those with entrenched automation. All the linked bond devices disappeared. My SmartThings hub got real annoyed and dropped a few orphaned automations (dropped about a dozen out of 189 rules I have), I should have seen that coming, took a long time to reenter them from my paper backup. Resetting also abandons the paired Somfy codes, after 12 more resets like this, I will need to also completely factory reset the Somfy drape’s motors which is an all day exercise in itself to reprogram primary remote, limits, directions and my positions.

Wish I could find out what made Bond go sour. I am hoping it is a slow corruption of the on device memory that grew over time from older Bond Firmware releases to more stable later ones, and that looking forward, this kind of corruption will abate? Wishful thinking.

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#10

That update is painful to read, but the eventual outcome is good to hear for now.

#11

Actually, we did have database corruption issues that were wreaking havoc with Somfy shades losing their pairing. During database compaction the firmware would sometimes leave corrupted bytes in what was supposed to be free space… something we called “mines” because when the database tried to use that space, it would drop the associated record and therefore forget the rolling code for the shade. This was fixed in v2.14+ firmware. That firmware both (a) fixed the underlying issue that caused the mines to be laid and (b) runs a cleanup routine (“minesweeper”) to prevent more failures on that unit due to the latent corruption. – I read you were on v2.15.x firmware, so maybe this is not related, but I thought I’d share this info.

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