I’m looking to leap into Home Assistant world with a Hass.io / Raspberry Pi setup - exciting times. I got sucked into the HA world when looking to by a Symfonisk remote to control a few Sonos speakers along with a few Tradfri lights here and there. Originally I was going to go with the Tradfri Gateway but after a bit of reading (and with a spare Raspberry Pi) I decided to jump in at the deep(er) end with a HA setup right from the start using a Conbee stick.
Having said that I’m completely new to this and so could do with a bit of advice (or just reassurance!)
Is it possible to control Sonos speakers with the Symfonisk remote via Conbee/Deconz without a Tradfri gateway?
If it is possible, how easy is this to do for someone new to HA - and what, if any, are the main downsides? (reliability issues, difficulty in updating firmware etc?)
I’ve read quite a few threads around the Symfonsik remote but most of them are related to using the remote as a dimmer for lights. I just wanted to make sure that in going down the HA/Conbee route I haven’t missed something obvious - like loosing the ability to easily control the Sonos speakers with the ikea remote.
I appreciate the setup will be a bit more complicated than using the Tradfri gateway, but I guess my question is how much more complicated!
Many thanks in advance for the wisdom of the HA community.
I also thought this would be a good idea for my setup.
Since I’ve fiddled around with the Tradfri blinds, I can give you some insights:
You can set up the remote with:
IKEA Tradfri Gateway (as you said)
deCONZ if you’ve got a ConBee/RaspBee device
ZHA (Home Assistans built-in Zigbee support)
ZHA is a lot easier to set up, activate the integration, paste the USB address (/dev/…) and add your remote as a new device.
deCONZ requires you to go into their own web interface, which is fine, but a few extra steps. On the plus side, you’ve got a lot more options when using the VNC interface.
ZHA has support for updating IKEA firmwares, as does deCONZ (you’ll get a better view of the upgrade progress with deCONZ)
I’ve had reliability issues with all of the 3 integrations and my Fyrtur blind, I’m now back to deCONZ, seems to work fine for now.
Thanks Fedot, really helpful confirmation that I’m on the right track.
I’d got as far as understanding that the Symfonisk remote could be set up with deCONZ/ZHA as a trigger, but I wasn’t sure it could then be set to control a Sonos unit as they are wifi not zigbee based. Great to hear it will all be possible!
Please be aware that you will not be able to control the volume of your sonos speaker smoothly with deconz, zha or anything else than the original IKEA hub. The reason is, that the remote has an event qhen you turn the wheel, but the event just says in which direction it turns,not how fast/far you turn the wheel.
There’s an app that has a workaround for this called Controller X. It got quite good feedback, but you need to test yourself whether this is sufficiently smooth for you.
I have the Symfonisk controller integrated with deCONZ and I control the volume of my Chromecast and Google Home mini (depending which one is playing). I control the volume with ControllerX (as @Burningstone suggested). I have to say that it feels pretty smooth. In fact, I just posted a video on my twitter account, so you can see the smoothness. Nonetheless, as @Burningstone said the controller just has the events of starting rotation (with direction) and stopping the rotation. Then ControllerX sends the volume change request periodically between the start and stop and that is what you can see in the video.
If you need any help installing/configuring ControllerX, let me know, I will be able to help
I have a mixed system of chromecast and sonos at home. I’ve not yet bought any hub hardware yet and so am open to which to get. At the moment I don’t expect to have the most complex home automation setup, mainly audio controls and lights.
Would using the Tradfri gateway allow me to connect Symfonisk controllers to the Sonos systems using the native Ikea connection and also allow connection of Symfonisk controllers to Chromecast units via ControllerX , or does ControllerX only work on a deCONZ / Conbee setup?
Using the Ikea gateway would be a slightly cheaper option and I know it can be used as a general Zigbee hub, but appreciate that there could be some limitations.
If you connect a remote to a Sonos speaker through the Ikea hub, you’ll only be able to use this remote with this sonos speaker, you can’t use it then to control other stuff or control it through Home Assistant.
Controller X works with Deconz, Zigbee2MQTT and ZHA, but not with the Ikea hub, Hue hub or similar.
ControllerX works with zigbee2mqtt, deconz, zha and mqtt. This is for the controller, for the light it uses the light entity and HA services. If you want to use the Tradfri gateway, then you won’t have the actions from the controller, you will just have control over the devices that are actionable (lights, switches, covers, etc), but I don’t think that the Tradfri gateway integration allows you to know the actions that an IKEA controller fired.
Perfect thanks both, @Burningstone - definitely looks like deCONZ / ConBee are the way to go for the level of flexibility I would want. I agree that the cost difference isn’t enough to justify the loss of HA functionality.
@xaviml, I’ll give ControllerX a go once I have the hardware based on your documentation. Sounds like an excellent implementation and very smooth from the video, thanks for the work on it.
@xaviml - just to check back in, I picked up a Symfonisk controller and my Conbee arrived yesterday. I’ve just set up a Raspberry pi with Hassio and set-up ControllerX following your instructions - great documentation, really clear and all working first time. Many thanks.
I have the Symfonisk set up to control a chromecast audio, which is so much easier than using the google app etc. Volume, play, pause, skip all working.
I notice the volume moves in steps of 10% using ControllerX - is this a behaviour that can be adjusted if more specific volumes are wanted i.e 5% jumps? Or is this a limitation of the fact the controller only sends start and stop events?
Anyway, really great app, especially if someone with no HA experience like me can set it up easily!
You are right, by default the steps are 10 and the delay between each call service (to change volume) is 500 for this device. For the steps, you can play around with volume_steps attribute and for the delay with delay attribute (measured in milliseconds).
volume_steps does not work by percentage but rather with steps, so if the number is 15, it calls 15 times HA to go from min to max. So the higher the number the smaller is each step. My current setup uses volume_steps: 15 and delay: 150. You can see my configuration in the video I posted in Twitter.
As a last note, I do not recommend to lower delay much more than 100ms because the overhead with the request and the change of the volume will take more than the delay you are waiting to send another one.
