Broadlink RM4 Pro - Sustained Commands

I’m trying to control a fireplace. There are a bunch of posts on here about this, but I haven’t found any that answer my question. I have a bond bridge that “kind-of” works, but its very unreliable. The fireplace needs a sustained signal for about 10 seconds to slowly move the control dial and the bond bridge can only repeat a button press a bunch of times. The fireplace misses half of the signals. Its not effective.

Can the RM4 send sustained commands to simulate holding the button on the remote for a few seconds?

Thank you

The is no such thing as a sustained command AFAIK. For example, Holding a button on a remote (like a volume button) sends a series of volume up commands with a delay in between. So to simulate that you’d create an automation that sends that command N times with an X ms delay in between.

So use the remote.send_command and specify the number of times and the delay. You’ll need to play around the the delay - too fast and commands are missed.

Ok. I wasn’t aware of that. I guess I just assumed based on the beeps the fireplace makes. When I hold the button on the remote, it beeps one time and then the dial keeps moving. With the bond bridge, I hear beeping sporadically. Not sure if I can adjust the timing with bond. Seems pretty locked down. Thank you for the information.

The command itself in HA has all the control you need to do this.

Sorry, I was referring to the bond bridge. I was able to modify the number of repeats on it, but maybe the duration between repeats isn’t right. The fireplace beeps a bunch and the dial doesn’t move as much as it should. It also seems like the commands to bond from HA are rate limited. I can only send a handful before it stops responding. So I can’t have home assistant handle the number of repeats and duration between them.

If the RM4 is more customizable, I may give it a shot.

you can always make an automation that has a delay between single service calls in a repeat action.

Ok. I realize this is off topic, but I think the bond bridge has some kind of rate limiting function. At least that’s the only way I can explain the behavior. If I try to send commands too quickly from HA, it stops responding for a few minutes. I was able to patch the command on the bridge to do x-number of repeats, but I cant control the frequency of the repeats. It doesn’t work reliably and it’s about the best I can do.

This is why I was looking into the broadlink.