I have a handful of different “smart” bulbs that I’ve accumulated while playing with these things and I also have an Ikea zigbee remote which currently is paired to my Tasmotized Sonoff bridge and being used to control a non-zigbee light through Home Assistant. I have another use case in mind and wanted to find out if it is something that I can expect to work before I buy more stuff only to discover that it won’t do what I want it to do.
What I would like is this: Zigbee bulb in a lamp that is controllable though Home Assistant, but also controllable via a zigbee remote placed near the lamp. I want to get that nice instantaneous response and smooth long-press dimming that you get with a remote paired directly to the bulb and avoid the glitchy behavior and occasional lag that seems to come with routing everything through HA. I have not yet found a way to set it up through HA so that I can hold a button to smoothly dim/brighten a lamp and release when it reaches the level I want. I still want to be able to use HA to control the bulb(s) though so I can use automations and scenes and it would be great if the light can still be controlled from the remote if the HA server goes down, that’s significant for the WAF. Can I do this or does the bulb have to be linked to either one thing or another? I’m a zigbee noob so I don’t really know what I should be searching for.
If you are using the HA ZHA zigbee setup, I believe the ability to ‘pair’ devices at the zigbee level can be done via the zigbee integrations page. I have yet to get this working, but seems the functions are here. It does seem dependent on the clusters/commands that the zha system exposed when the devices are joined to the network. The function to do this I believe is under the ‘Manage Clusters’ for a given zigbee device. So for example, this is what is available for a Ikea occupancy sensor, I am still learning. Share if you are successful:
I’ll have to play with that. I went ahead and ordered a couple more Ikea dimmer remotes so I can try to set one up to control a lamp in the bedroom. Local control that just works is mandatory for the WAF, and it’s a pretty high priority for me too. Being able to automate my lights is super cool but the most important thing is still the ability to just flip a switch and have the light respond every time.
So I was able to get this working, unfortunately I forgot to bookmark the tutorial I used but essentially I created a group, added the lamp with the Hue bulb to that group, and then bound that group to the Ikea remote and it works great, it’s exactly what I wanted. Except for one thing, the side buttons don’t work to change the color temperature so I might have to set up some additional automations to handle that.
