My kitchen fan has both an up-light and a down-light but Alexa only sees a single light. If you ask her to turn it on or off, the result is that one or the other or both go on / off. I think it’s attempting to do both every time, but often only one of the lights changes. Is there any way to separate the lights for Alexa? Both toggle and dim independently in the Bond app.
The fan is Hampton Bay. FCC Id CHQ8BT7078T model UC7078T. It’s found and works as an “A1a” in the remote finder, but it’s not an exact match. The physical remote doesn’t have the dimmer or direction commands that are on the A1a - the dimming works quite well anyway but the direction never changes.
Alexa currently uses the Bond Home TurnLightOn and TurnLightOff actions, which are an abstraction above TurnUpLightOn, TurnDownLightOff, etc… That combines with the fact that your remote’s underlying protocol only supports a “ToggleUpLight” and “ToggleDownLight” signal, so there’s complicated “trust_state” logic to attempt to keep Bond’s belief and the true state of the lights aligned.
Question
If you had to choose, which of these alternatives would you prefer?
3x light devices exported to Alexa: “XXX Fan Light”, “XXX Fan Up Light”, “XXX Fan Down Light” (note: this would wreak havoc with “Alexa turn all my lights off”)
2x light devices exported: “XXX Fan Up Light”, “XXX Fan Down Light”.
Continue to export only “XXX Fan Light”, but have it only control the down-light. Up-light would not work in Alexa, only via Bond Home app.
In the case of this particular fan the power to the whole unit is controlled by a single wall switch which we use far more often than either the remote/app/Alexa. I keep “trust tracked state” turned off because it’s almost always wrong.
Ah, one of those RF wall switches I guess? (They can really look like they are wired controls, but probably actually RF… they will have an FCC ID on the back )
Makes sense. As you no doubt have found, the downside is that asking to “turn off all the lights” will turn on lights that were already off. We’re still dreaming of a future where we could track the commands from the RF remotes too, but that’s still months out and may not work well.
I share your intuition here. (Though I don’t own one of these two-light fans myself. Gotta get me one!)
The wall switch I have is just a normal “dumb” power switch that cuts the electricity. When the power is turned off by the switch no number of radio commands to it can turn it back on. At power on both the fan and lights revert to whatever state they were in before the power was cut.
I am having the same problem with Google Home. I would like to be able to ToggleUpLight and ToggleDownLight but Google Home only sees them as one light. The temporary workaround would be to setup 2 fans, one for UpLight and one for DownLight, but that isn’t as cool!
My vote would be for #2 above. You can group the lights other ways if you want, but I don’t see the need option 1.
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