Hey folks, new Bond user here. I’ve setup the Bond bridge to control my SelectBlinds shades and so far so good. I got the SmartThings integration working as well, although SmartThings is only showing an on/open and off/close button and there is no stop button. I was looking into if it was possible to create a SmartThings scene to open the shades->wait a few seconds->Stop. This way I can open the shades only half way.
Is there a device handler that would enable the Stop button for shades in SmartThings?
Sadly the SmartThings integration is very basic and we don’t have that capability right now. Also, there could be problems with latency that may make that automation not work too well. However, I don’t see why in principle we couldn’t petition the Samsung folks to add a more sophisticated UI for shades. (As of previous work on our ST integration, we had to pick from pre-made UIs or request changes to the UI to be made by Samsung.)
I recently purchased and setup a Bond Bridge as a SmartThings Connected Service. I immediately noticed that the shades show up as on/off device in SmartThings. I contacted Bond support and they claimed that the SmartThings API doesn’t support open/close device types. Of course other connected services have this working, therefore SmartThings must have this capability.
This has been a well known complaint from other Bond/SmartThings users for well over a year now. I’m very disappointed with the products poorly implemented integration. Should Bond not address this issue in a timely manner, I will abandon the product and search for a suitable alternative. Even if this means replacing all my motors.
To elaborate further, if SmartThings is connected to Google Home, you must tell Google to “Turn On” the shades to open them and “Turn Off” the shades to close them. This is utterly ridiculous!
Unless I’m missing it, any official integration in Smart Things for any blind or shade still uses voice commands of “Turn On to open and Turn Off to close”.
With all due respect, you are clearly mistaken. You do not have any idea what you are talking about.
I have other zigbee shades directly connected to SmartThings and they show up as Open/Close devices.
Shades/blinds controlled by Bond Bridge and connected to SmartThings via connected services show up as On/Off devices. This has nothing to do with Google. Google knows how to interpret open/close for shade/blind devices and signal that to SmartThings.
I respectfully request that you escalate this issues to a developer that is familiar with the basic concepts that you are not grasping. Otherwise you will continue to demonstrate your ineptitude of your product which is not wise business strategy. Might I add that perspective Bond customers will not be so willing to purchase the product.
My apologies for not seeing the threads you have. I am a community enthusiast and not affiliated with Bond, Google, or SmartThings.
I do know that SmartThings has Open / Close aspects available within their system and that Bond’s ST integration doesn’t yet use that method, but I was still unclear if SmartThings had updated their integrations with Google Assistant to expose any such Open/Close ST devices as Open or Close voice commands (everything I was seeing said Google still had to be told On or Off, even for Open / Close devices in ST).
The thread you linked to (which I have read before but read again now) didn’t clear that up for me, but in any case, I understand you have a different experience with your ZigBee shades in SmartThings (and then likely you are getting your desired experience with Google Assistant voice command control of them via SmartThings <–> Google Assistant).
The Bond staff (@merck or others) who come through here from time to time are going to be in a better place to further explain any SmartThings enhancements they may have on the roadmap beyond what official Bond Support mentioned to you already.
Thanks @residualimages for jumping in. Your enthusiasm is much appreciated over here!
Last time I checked, we had an order of magnitude fewer ST users than GH or Alexa users, but it was costing us several times more dev time to maintain, so we put less effort into the ST integration TBH.
However, this forum exists so we can hear when we’re not meeting (power-)user expectations, so, we’re looking into this right now.
Two things we found:
When we initially did the ST connector, they didn’t have Open/Close.
Checking now, they do have Open/Close. (May have been available for a long while.)
There’s been an uptick in ST users. It’s actually at about 50% of our GH users, which is massively higher than before. That changes the equation a bit.
We will see what we can do. Will update on Monday… (we have a no-deploys-on-Friday policy).
Indeed we had this limitation of having to use turn on/off commands in order to open/close, but as of yesterday (oct 4th, 2021) a new version of the integration code has been deployed that also supports open/close commands (we kept the on/off commands as well).
You might need to re-sync your devices in order for the new commands to work properly.
Any feedback is appreciated, let me know if these changes fulfill your expectations.
From within SmartThings, I removed the Bond Home connected service via Settings->Linked Services-> Bond Home->Delete Device.
I checked that all Bond devices were removed from SmartThings, which they were. I then added the Bond Home again. Devices still show up as On/Off, not Open/Close.
After developing and testing the proposed changes, it seems that there are some technical difficulties with this solution.
Unfortunately, SmartThings doesn’t cope very well with capabilities with partial implementation, which means that in order to support open/close commands, we would need to support also a SetPosition command. This is why our integration follows the same restriction.
This may be possible to implement via a custom capability, but this is currently uncharted territory for me. I’ll dig in the documentation and explore this possibility in the upcoming days.
So if I understand correctly, 50% of you GH users are Smartthings users, and those users are still to this date restricted to treating their shades/blinds as on/off devices instead of open/close devices. It doesn’t seem like ANY attention is being given to this issue even though it affects a large portion of your customer base. Perhaps this post will act as a warning label to perspective Bond customers wishing to integrate their shades/blinds to Smartthings. Had I known this issues existed prior to purchasing a Bond hub , and known up front that Bond would drag their feet implementing this most basic functionality, I may not have purchased a Bond hub.
Know this thread is old, but wanted to check in on original question - “Stop” functionality for Smarthings integration. Glad the open/closed was fixed, but what about stop?
For my blinds, stop moves the shades to their pre-set location. Works on Bond app, but no Stop feature in Smarthings. Is this still a Smarthings windowShade capability problem?