Has anybody had any luck pairing a Superio Fireplace Remote and got it to control the fireplace?
I am able to add the buttons to the Bond App and using the EF-BRCK but it doesn’t work controlling the fireplace. I have a feeling it has something to do with the “Security Code” the fireplace stores from the remote. And I would need the bond to have it’s own security code.
Here is a clip from the instructions. You pair the remote with the Fireplace first…
The control module will learn up to 3 different transmitter security codes (only one may be a thermostat style).
3.
Security codes will be retained in memory indefinitely if power is removed.
4.
Press and hold learn switch on for 6-seconds then release to clear all transmitter security codes retained in memory. Repeat learn process as needed.
I suspect you’re on the right track there; other folks have also had issues where the original remote would send conflicting signals (particularly in a “keep alive” type recurrence).
I personally don’t have any fireplaces to set up with my Bond Bridges, but I know a couple questions the community and Bond staff might want to ask.
Does your original remote have an FCC ID on it anywhere?
Can you upload pictures of the front, back and battery compartment of the remote if not?
Does the Bond Bridge automatically find the fireplace when recording the first couple buttons, or do you have to record all buttons?
If it automatically found the commands after a couple buttons of recording, can you see the Template it assigned in the app, under the fireplace device / settings page?
I’ve had issues with my fireplace as well, and finally gave up. I’m not sure what it is about fireplaces, but they seem to be problematic. Has anyone had any success having Bond control a fireplace?
There are numerous folks with different kinds of fireplaces that do have success.
If you’re having difficulty, please reach out to Chat in the app during business hours, or send an email to customerservice@olibra.io to start a ticket.
The forums here are often helpful and offer a sense of community, but those official support options will be quicker.
I have and they’ve said that this remote hasn’t been tested so it’s not supported. I’d be glad to try to help test, but understand that you can’t possibly deal with every variant of remote out there.
On an unrelated note, I wrote a windows app to control the bond that you were taking a look at way back when (so long ago that it was before the pandemic) butyou were busy with other things. I wonder if you were at a place now where you’d like to take a look?
And on Bond’s website, it is currently marked as ‘Not Supported’.
That being said, @endy and other Bond friends - is this on a roadmap for future development, or is there something about the encoding / signal modulation that makes it unlikely for future support?
So I have this same remote (at least based on the FCC ID) - Bond still marks this remote as ‘Not Supported’. Is there something I can do to help change that? I am curious if it will never be supported due to some issue with the signal as @residualimages mentions.
I was able to get the power on / off buttons to work - the remote acts like it’s a toggle on/off but I had to make discrete on / off buttons in the Bond app, which I actually prefer so that’s great. Next, there are 6 fan and flame height settings, and again while the remote appears to have a flame / fan up/down it does not work like that in practice - and of course there’s no fan up/down buttons in the Bond app to program for some reason (while there are flame up/down buttons…)
With that said, I am struggling with the flame height and fan speed buttons - whenever I program the flame height, the fan speed signal is also sent. So for example if I program the ‘low’ flame height button it will also send the signal for whatever the fan speed is currently at. If the fan speed was set to high when I am programming the flame height buttons, it will set both the flame height and the fan speed. The opposite also is true, when I program the fan speed the flame height signal is also sent to the fireplace.
I thought perhaps the remote itself is causing the issue, but after pulling the batteries from the remote it still occurs. Of course on the remote itself this does not happen - flame height and fan speed are separate settings.
Perhaps this is why it’s unsupported, but I’d like to know if there’s something I can do to resolve it. I opened a ticket with support, and they responded very quickly but so far have just confirmed that the remote is unsupported and provided the steps on how I can manually program it.
There are a bunch of temperature options on the remote as well, I assume these will not work - I would be happy with on/off and flame height / fan speed only though - I can put a temperature sensor in the room and setup my own automations around that.
Between this and the “discrete on and off”, sounds like a stateful packet is being sent via this remote for every command.
Yet it also seems technically compatible with Bond’s Bridge hardware and radios since it can capture and replay …
@merck , how likely is it the Bond team would have support for this (likely) stateful fireplace remote in the future? With separate fan speeds and flame heights commands in Bond (but which might actually have to send both parameters in the RF packet any time changing either)?
@residualimages - you have been incredibly helpful, and I really appreciate your posts on this forum. I’ve found several other posts from you that have been enlightening to say in the least.
Opening a ticket, the Bond representatives were extremely responsive (surprisingly so in fact) - but unfortunately due to this remote being ‘unsupported’ they were only able to direct me to the guides on how to do the commands.
With all of that said, I believe the only solution (at least for my level of ability) is to create multiple custom commands - is this possible? Since the fan speed and flame height commands are sent simultaneously, I’d like to essentially build a list of each combination. Fan high / flame low, fan high / flame medium, fan high / flame high, fan medium / flame low, fan medium / flame medium so on and so on. I was then going to leverage the Bond API with Home Assistant to map all of these out. I was hoping with the Bond API this would be achievable, but via the Bond app it certainly is not.
If that is not possible… I’m not sure how to have the best of both worlds. Perhaps I will just settle on a flame height setting and have a static flame height with adjustable fan speeds - as that seems more important to be able to adjust the fan speed vs the flame height.
Is there another way to get a hold of Bond devs? Their support, while helpful, did not express any interest in getting my request up to the dev department. The answer was basically “if it’s unsupported, you’re on your own”. Which I can respect from a support team, but disappointing that I could not put in a feature request or provide assistance in getting full support. I am not much of a programmer, but I am certainly willing help with testing.
Edit - I just had a thought, perhaps adding multiple fireplaces for my single fireplace will achieve my goal… not pretty, but it may work. Going to attempt that tonight.
Actually… I think your multiple fireplaces method might be the easiest. Might even be able to do it all in the app!
Especially if you call each grouping of fan speeds under a Fireplace device each for “High Fire” , “Medium Fire”, “Low Fire”, etc.
Keep us posted.
If you end up needing API command line help to mess with things, though, I’ll check back in tomorrow and see if I can help out.
The various developers and Bond staff members that come through here as their time permits is one of the avenues we have to bring community requested features or devices to their attention. (Tagged @merck above for a little extra sparkle on this thread)
It does indeed work! There are 6 flame and fan settings, I didn’t feel it was necessary to map all of those permutations… But I now have 3 fireplaces in Bond for low/medium/high flame heights and then I programmed 4 different fan settings between off/low/med/high for each fireplace/flame height - seems to all work as expected in the Bond app!
Going to now fiddle with this in HA, which I know is outside of the scope of this forum. But I think I have a pretty good handle on that - I’ve also been playing with the API calls in cURL, I think I have what I need there as well (again thanks for your extremely helpful post on API calls!)
Hey @arrrghhh, we hear you, but TBH our focus is on the shade space atm. One idea that keeps popping up for me is what would happen if we made it so that users like yourself could write your own rf drivers. Would be in lua and reasonably easy to deal with.
@merck, appreciate your response here. I’m not an expert in Lua but willing to learn.
In the meantime, this workaround isn’t the prettiest (most aren’t) - and doesn’t allow me to use the native Bond integration in Home Assistant, but thankfully the Bond REST API is available and of course HA supports that.
It’s all done and working great! I’ll do a write-up on the HA forums on the detailed steps.
Would it be possible for you to post screenshots of your multiple fireplace setup? I have an electric fireplace (Simplifire Allusion) with an IR remote and I think I have a similar situation - I can create “buttons” to turn it on and off, and one button for on with max heat, but not one for low heat, and I have been unable to change flame color, rock color, fan speed, etc.
Hey there - not sure from the Bond side what you would want to see? I have one fireplace, and I set them up as 3 separate fireplaces. There are flame high/med/low fireplaces, and then within each fireplace I have fan off/low/med/high.
I do have an on/off config which is only mapped to a single fireplace, the ‘medium flame’ one - doesn’t really matter which one, it’s arbitrary - I just needed some way to turn the fireplace off (I suppose the ‘on’ is redundant at this point as the other commands will turn the fireplace on).
I hope that helps! Let me know if you need more information. The Bond part of this was pretty easy, the HA part was a bit trickier… I still need to do a writeup, just have not had time.
Evidently I can only put 1 embedded media item per post… so I’ll just link these to imgur.
Thanks for sharing the screenshots! I definitely see the logic behind this, and I tried it with mine and it still doesn’t work properly. It’s janky, (I can do flame on/off and fan low on/off and fan high on/off) I don’t know how or why these work but they are… even though I have different “commands” for each.
I notice yours is RF and mine is IR, I wonder if that’s part of the problem…
I’ve attached a pic of my remote mapping so that hopefully someone smarter than me can figure this out. I know it should work, because the Bond is talking to the fireplace, but it’s not quite right
