Hampton Bay Controller

I have a fan that has the following controller:

Is there a way to control this fan with SmartThings or another hub?

Short answer: No. It’s using a very short range proprietary protocol which doesn’t match anything that SmartThings uses.

Long answer: yes, but it would be clunky and inelegant, as well as expensive.

I myself am quadriparetic with limited hand function, so I pay a lot of attention to options like this. But they just wouldn’t make economic sense for most people.

Anyway, there is a South Korean engineering company, Naran, which is putting out a line of microbots, and they have an IFTTT channel. One of the microbots is called “push,” intended as a robot finger. It’s a tiny actuator. Each microbot lists at $49 and you also have to buy the $89 Prota bridge to get the IFTTT integration. ( One Prota can support up to 40 Microbots).

The way these are designed, you need on microbot per button. That’s not too bad if you want to automate something like a coffee maker, but in your case, you would need one for each of the buttons on that switch. And that could add up.

So I don’t think you’re going to want to do this, but I did mention it just in case this is a situation like mine where the extra money might be worth it.

I haven’t tried this device yet myself, although I’m pretty sure my family is getting me the starter kit with three Microbots for Christmas, so I’ll know more in January. But the company has good credentials and I think it will be worth trying for some people if you buy it from someplace with a good return policy.

There are some people in the community who have hacked a similar version for other projects by taking apart a physical remote and adding either actuators or relays to it, but there are a number of risks in that kind of option.

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My brother is also a JD Roberts, lol.

That stinks. I found this wink enabled remote, but I can’t find it for sale anywhere.

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Yep. There’s a thread where several of us are keeping an eye both on Wink-enabled fan and the separate controller. The fan is out in some stores, but no one has gotten it worked with ST yet, as far as I know. And some of the Wink hub user reviewers haven’t been great yet. So it’s a wait and see for me.

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