Bond Device (Automate Remote Commands)
I only gave this 3 stars out of 5 because there are some small issues that they should have fixed a long time ago and are still an issue.
I hooked this up to a ceiling fan in my kitchen. I have a second fan being delivered today that I will also hook up to it. My fan is a 6 speed fan with an LED light attached. It is completely controlled by a remote, no hanging strings. The remote has a lot of buttons including on and off for the fan and light, dimming buttons for the light, two buttons for changing the direction of the fan blades, timer functions, and buttons to increase or decrease the speed of the fan by one step each. This last part bothered me because I wondered how Bond would change it to the speed I wanted to without problems.
So I followed the directions and started to set up the remote. I don't know why, I choose one of the reverse buttons as the first one to set up. Upon detecting the remote, it asked me which of 2 remotes I was setting up based on this one button. Reading the remote model, I choose the one that matched and the rest of the buttons were set up instantly! This really made it easy for setup as I didn't know how to set up half of them because the buttons were listed as buttons to set up. They added buttons for this which I will showed pictures of from the APP. After that, I attached the Bond APP to the Google Home APP so that I could control the fan with my voice.
Now what I can do is specifically tell Google which speed I want my fan to be on. I can say, speed 6, it will set it to speed 6 which was my main concern. The fan can be turned on and off via voice command as well as the LED light. There is even a chart that allows special commands like setting the fan to hurricane force for the high setting. Commands like low, medium, and high work too.
What doesn't work is the reverse function and the light dimming through google home. Bond's interface doesn't allow me to use voice commands or set up voice commands for the buttons they have. I am stuck with the basic on and off commands or fan speed. When I ask google to reverse the fan, it says that the feature isn't part of my fan even though it is. I can use the Bond APP to reverse with the buttons or dim with the buttons though, but using the app wasn't what I wanted as it was supposed to be completely voice command. After doing research into this, I learned that this was always an issue going on for years that people complained about but Bond hasn't addressed even though they promised to address. People even asked for API access to create their own work around. IFTTT doesn't allow a workaround either.
I am guessing that the reverse feature doesn't work because my remote has a Summer and Winter button instead of one button. As for the dimmer, I have tried a lot of different commands but nothing works (numbers, medium, etc...). The button names were the first options I used but they SmartThings won't link to Bond which would have been a work around if it did, It is another feature the company promised to link but hasn't yet which could have solved a lot of problems.
So I can control the fan speed and turn the fan and lights n and off. I need the APP or remote to change the direction or dim the lights. It isn't ideal but works enough that I won't complain too much. I am not happy with the research I found on future Bond development, because they promised for years they would provide us with features that we need but haven't come out with yet. I wanted a fan I could reverse on command, I didn't get that. The dimming of the lights would have been nice, but I could live without.
If Bond was smart, they would set up their API so google commands would access the button names which could be renamed to the chooser's desired command. I would love to say, "Hey Google, set {Fan Name} to {Winter}!" Allowing custom names would have solved this but Google integration hasn't really been implemented like it could have been.
So in the end, it works enough but not the way it should.
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-owned