I've got Bond up and configured working with a ceiling fan and light in my MBR. I've hard wired the fan on and installed a smart switch that only interacts with hubitat (does not physically control fan or light).
The fan light is one button on/off and occasionally the switch gets confused. What rules would you suggest to ensure off always means off so that I could incorporate motion sensors and not get phone calls that the switch is broken
Oh yeah, this is a tricky one. I believe I have exactly the same situation.
Fan light with a remote
The remote only has one button for the light. It's a toggle button.
You use a Bond or a Broadlink (I have a Broadlink) to emulate the remote and send the toggle command.
And then you have either a real or virtual smart switch, and you make a Rule Machine rule that when the switch changes, you make your Bond/Broadlink send the toggle command.
The problem happens if the light gets toggled by any other source. For example, if someone uses the old remote, instead of your switch. Then the switch is basically "backwards".
(Sidenote: You mention incorporating motion sensors. I don't think this should be a problem, if you make your rules/motion automation flip your smartswitch, rather than interacting with the Bond directly. You always want the commands to Bond/Broadlink to come from just one place.)
But back to the problem of what if someone hits the toggle button on the old remote. Ok, now my switch is out of sync with the actual light. Unfortunately, there's no solution to this without more hardware. You need a communication path back from the light to Hubitat to indicate that its state has changed, so that you can update the state of the controlling smart switch. In my case, what I'm working on right now is patching into the wiring to the fan light, and using a Reed Relay hacked into a zigbee contact sensor. Basically, the contact sensor will report the true light state back to Hubitat, no matter if the toggle command came from my Broadlink or from the remote.
Jwetzel hit it exactly. I think latency may be causing mine to get out of sync and was hoping I could solve that with a rule (press off on switch and trigger Bond, if off is pressed again trigger Bond again). I was thinking more motion for turning the light off (no movement in 30 mins, trigger off) but if it got backwards that rule would turn the light on.
Interested to hear your progress on the current sensor. Isn't there anything we could buy from a zwave or zigbee perspective that would detect current?
For the other person who mentioned a contact sensor, how would that work? Haven't used one before
I don't know for certain that my solution is the best, but it's tricky because there are several constraints (at least in my case):
I need something tiny that I can fit into the space in my fan canopy next to the light.
I need it to be triggered by a DC voltage across the wires going into the light board.
It needs to be zwave or zigbee
And the big one: it must be battery powered! I won't have mains power where it goes in my fan. (It's a very compact fan body.)
So, I have several Iris V1 contact sensors. They're battery powered and tiny. When you move a magnet next to them, they have a reed switch that triggers, and then they send out the zigbee message. However, you could replace that reed switch with a reed relay. This has 4 contacts instead of 2. If it has a voltage across the extra 2 contacts, it shorts out the first 2 contacts, similar to what a reed switch does when a magnet is nearby. So, I just need to measure the DC voltage going into the LED board, pick out an appropriately spec'ed reed relay, and do some soldering...
That's the plan. Unfortunately, it's about 7 items down on the to-do list right now...
That makes sense! It seems like a lot of work though and with custom stuff like that I worry about it breaking in the future and being a huge project to repair. I usually would prefer to buy something purpose built.
I was thinking you were suggesting some type of in-line switch for the current, in which case you could replace Bond all together
