(Bond Bridge & Pro) Master channel verses groups

The information below is from a post Merc, Bond CTO, made on the Bond forum concerning Master channels and Groups.  This provides some useful information on what impact using different ways to move more than one shade will have on the movement and control.

Master Channels

The traditional way of creating a “group” of shades was to take an unused remote control channel and pair it to every motor that you wish to move with that “group”. Now, when you operate the “master channel” all the motors move, even though you did not operate them from the individual channel.

You can do this within the Bond app by creating a new “shade device” which you then proceed to pair to all the motors in the location or facade. You can just stay on the Pair screen and repeatedly hit the Pair button without accepting the “did the shade jog” question. You can also get back to the Pair button for an existing device in Device Settings > Advanced > Pair & Unpair.

Advantages

• Shades all start to move at the same time. No popcorn effect.
• Works with all integrations.
• Works even with ancient Bond hardware from the iceage (Snowbird units with serial numbers starting A or B, with v2 firmware).

Disadvantages

• when operating the master channel, Bond does not know what other devices in the app should have their states updated, so the states show wrong
• does not work properly with the dead reckoned slider we have for RMS12 (Somfy RTS) and a few other technologies. Basically, if you have to set the course time with the wizard during setup to “calibrate your shade”, it will NOT work properly with a master channel.

Groups

The alternative to a master channel is to create a Group in the Bond Home app. This just takes a few taps.

Advantages

• can mix different motor technologies in a single Group
• motors still start together when supported by the underlying motor technology, such as ARC (Rollease) and Gaposa.
• states of the member devices are updated when the group is controlled

Disadvantages

• although documented on our open API, most integrations do not support our Groups feature, so you will not see it on your control system.
• legacy motor technologies that lack channel bitmaps (such as RTS) still have popcorn effect*

Scenes

The best scenario is to set up a Group, and then include the Group in a Bond Scene.

Advantages

• all the advantages of Groups
• plus, supported by Alexa & Google Home
• support on Control4 (and other pro integrations) is forthcoming

Disadvantages

• you do need to create one scene for each Group action

(*) There is a way we could eliminate this by using a master channel inside the Group, but the complexity of setting this up just for legacy RF technologies never made sense for us.