used the following docker container and updated my zigbee to the latest and it seems the symfonisk rotary remotes still dont register anything, the only entity is the battery level. Wondering if I will have the same trouble with the Fyrtur if I were to buy them
Yup the battery drain problem remainsā¦ you can only use the buttons if you have NO OTHER powered zigbee devices in your house. The can not use repeaters without having a dead battery the next dayā¦ IKEA needs a firmware updateā¦ they are uselessā¦ This goes with the binds tooā¦ If they need a Zigbee powered āhopā to get back to the hub they will have dead batteries in a few weeks too.
Iāve been running 6 FYRTURās for a month now with basically no issues (Installed July 1 2021). I have the HUSBZB stick, and no gateway. Although Iām using ZHA and not Ziigbee2mqtt. My shades have only gone through ~13% battery in a month, and Iāve never noticed a false or missed open/close event. Iād say of all the things Iāve added to my setup, these were some of the easiest to get running.
The only remaining issue that I have is that only one of the shades is actively reporting its battery level to me, for the other 5 I need to go in and do the cluster fix that has been reported earlier in this thread (although Iām not sure if there is something that Iām doing something wrong with that as its never updating automatically, if I want a new battery reading I need to go back to the cluster settings and manually click āget settingā).
But yea, my experience is 100% worth it and functional.
Iād love to know what you did right. I have them working 95% of the time by removing the battery on one of them and just keeping it disconnected. I feel like something isnāt right about this.
You are very luckyā¦ Or you donāt have a lot of Zigbee devices in your house. Others have demonstrated that the Idea buttons use a non-standard ālinkā protocol and if you Zigbee mesh changes, in any way, the IKEA battery devices will repetitively look for the original mesh and until their batteries are dead. Normally this takes about 48hrs after the mesh changes. I have manged to keep two ikea buttons alive on a HUBZB stick and ZHA for about 3 months but only if I removed all of the IKEA repeaters from my house. If you have figured away to get the buttons to work with the repeaters and not have dead batteries after a few days then you have succeeded where dozens have failed.
Hmm, I have the same experience as @dmx21. I installed also 4 FYRTURs 6 weeks ago. Since my pi4 is 2 floors up, I installed the Ikea repeaters distributed across my house (1 on each floor in the hallway). I only have an Ikea lamp next to the shades. I added 2 of the open-close remotes. I use ZHA with a CC2531 plugged into the pi4. So I guess you could say that this is indeed not a very big Zigbee mesh. But I have absolutely no issue with battery drain and it all works very fast. There has never been a no-response.
I have to say I paired the remotes to ZHA only and use an automation in HA to trigger the shades when a button is pressed. I did not bother with groups. So I just have an automation that lowers/raises 4 blinds on a button press trigger.
When I paired the remotes, I actually paired them in ZHA via the repeater devices. You can clearly see in my visualization that the buttons connect via the ikea repeaters. They have been doing that for over 6 weeks now with my batteries showing 87% in HA. I donāt know if the buttons stay connected to the repeaters all the time. I havenāt checked if they indeed sometimes connect via another powered device. But at least I can confirm that in my case the remotes connect to the repeaters and I have no battery drain issue (with ZHA).
EDIT: interestingly one of the remotes reports offline vey often (as you can see in the screenshot), but when I press it, it actually reports instantly in HA. So I never bothered looking into that.
I have one Fyrtur, button, and a repeater. It is working fine. However in zigbee2mqtt I only see the repeater device. The button and the Fyrtur itself do not appear. What could be the cause of this?
Do the Fyrturs/buttons require the repeaters or can I get by without them?
So far they have been working well. We have 3 blinds at the moment, one of them has been running for about 6 weeks.
Remote button battery also seems to be working fairly well. I am using the original IKEA repeater at the moment. I added a few buttons for fixed positions - they do control all three blinds.
These are all IKEA buttons. The Car Port button has been going through a bit more battery than I want. The repeater information is good to have. It would be nice if could manually set a route. Most blind remote buttons are close enough to the DECONZ stick.
This is one puzzle I want to solve one day. Get the battery indicator working correctly. It may just be a firmware upgrade for the blind but that requires taking them out of HA and connect them to an IKEA unit.
Iāve tried both ways on a clean setup with a couple blinds and by far using the tradfri hub seems to be the best way to go for me. When connected directly through ZHA commands seem to take longer to reach the device and stopping the blinds midway results in the inability to keep moving in the same direction. For instance, if I open the blinds and hit stop midway up in ha, I can only go down at that point, not up anymore. The biggest downfall I have with using the hub is another device and if the hub goes offline for some reason the integration needs to be restarted.
Iām able to control my blinds with IKEA hub and integration. I think what ur7x is saying is that you wont be able to use the remote to run any automations in HA but I could be wrong. Basically the remote will be working independently to open, close, and pause the blinds through the IKEA hub but will not be of any use in HA. The blinds are able to be controlled fully though through HA with the IKEA integration. One known issue seems to be that if the IKEA hub goes down for any reason, power, network, ect, the HA integration must be restarted to establish a connection. Looks like this is a known bug and is being worked on. No solution though from what I read.
Yes that is the caseā¦ The IKEA Hub does NOT expose the Fyrtur button events to HA or at least so far I canāt see the Button events on ZHA. That makes them useless in HA since they can ONLY control the blindsā¦
I have all blinds as ikea and thats my only complaint about them, no battery status of the actual blind
These instructions worked great for me. I use zigbee2mqtt and it works fine. You can use the zigbee2mqtt web UI to setup groups of blinds and bind the remote to them.
I have 2 of them here and I get battery status just fine, but only after upgrading the firmware via OTA. I am using zigbee2mqtt and the IKEA TEST OTA option enabled, then restart and try to OTA again. Before trying to OTA, quick-press both buttons, the light will come on and stay on, no breathing effect or pulsing. This wakes up the device for configuration. At this point, OTA requests will find the device fine and you will get progress updates in the UI. I hope this helps! I donāt think you have to stop using ZHA or any other existing integration just to update the devices, temporarily setup zigbee2mqtt and bring the device IDs over from the ZHA config (I think this would work, havenāt tested).
As for everyone wondering how to best use buttons:
They are designed to work via TouchLink directly with their paired devices. But they also support grouping just fine. They will never expose button events via any of the platforms, I donāt think Deconz does this eitherā¦ (but might be doable via sniffing or such and still not out of the box).
Each blind is sold with a Repeater + Remote combo, this is for a reason. Without any hub, this constitutes a standalone ZigBee mesh. I do not think if having multiple setups, the repeaters ever talk to each other, unless grouping is used and then only one repeater is used as ācoordinatorā for that group.
To retain the original functionality and still control the blinds via HA, do the following, in zigbee2mqtt:
- Create a group in Groups and add the shade(s) not the buttons.
- Go to buttonās device page / Bind tab
- Set Source to Endpoint 1, Set Destination to your blind group
- Enable following Clusters:
Closures, LevelCtrl, OnOff -
WAKE UP THE BLIND AND THE REMOTE BEFORE BIND:
5.1: On blind: quick-press both buttons, the light will come on and stay on
If it starts breathing / flashing, you held the buttons too long and are in āpairingā mode. Set your ZigBee platform to āJoin modeā to have it be auto-reconfigured.
5.2: On remote: press any of the buttons - Click Bind
NOTE: Next step is crucial otherwise the remote will still send commands to the stick first. Not sure if it needs to be done before or after binding. - Unbind the first binding that maps the remote to the coordinator (should first on screen).
This applies to any ZigBee platform that supports Binding and I believe the concepts for source, destination and what is considered a coordinator are pretty much the same across the board.
If any the bind/unbind steps return red notifications, one of the devices (or both) was not ready to receive your commands. Repeat the wake up step and try again.
Cool stuff: this should work the same between any ZigBee devices. So far I have bound the shades to their remote (certainly not the one they were originally paired with, I had reset them many many times and never had them marked so this doesnāt matter), Philips Hue Dimmer Remotes to IKEA bulbs (this combo allows for more brightness levels and a lower minimum than via the next remote, NO CT adjustment), the IKEA round dimmer remote to 2 TRADFRI bulbs (for this one, adjusting CT worked only on one of the bulbs, the second one never changed, while level adjustment worked on both), IKEA Symfonisk Sound Controller to 2 TRADFRI LED drivers + 1 TRADFRI bulb, and so far this last one has been the least responsive and reliable. This little rascal produces a boat load of talking for each level change and if you do too much too quick, it can confuse the lights. Also sometimes it refuses to either turn them on or offā¦
Lessons learned: if you want to use the original remotes and not have them be e-waste straight away, you need to find a way to track the shade position and stop it before it opens too high (open = you can see through the window 
). Closure level is controlled by quick-double-press on any of the buttons when at the desired level. This will overwrite the position matching 100% closed on the blind and will report correctly in Lovelace / elsewhere. I am too new to Home Assistant (2 weeks as of this post, coming from Hubitat) to have a good solution for a max-open level. The way I have them installed I want to avoid them going past 96% open. I achieved this very effortlessly with a Philips remote and Node-Red. But for the little guys, Iām still working on a node-red sequence.
Disclaimer: I am running a Sonoff ZigBee stick with the original firmware, which doesnāt support all the features the TRADFRI devices can support, such as the motion sensors presence reporting. Some of this bind stuff might work better with more powerful sticks.
1 Like
Ok followed this but cant unbind from the coordinator at all before or after the bind to group
For what itās worth, after using the blinds with ZHA for about 8 months and having reliability issues with all of the blinds in each room (3 in one room, 4 in another) opening 100% of the time, I ended up just buying the Tradfri hub and using the official Ikea integration. Here are my findings:
Pros: Everything works and is 100% reliable. On/off buttons can now be used and no longer exhibit immediate battery drain to death.
Cons: No longer have battery status for the blinds available in HA. I also donāt see them in the Ikea app which is puzzling.
For me, the tradeoff was entirely worth it.
1 Like
Are you running other devices through your ZHA network? Have you noticed any problems having multiple zigbee networks in the same location?
With the Tradfri hub, are you able to tell the shade to open to X%? Right now I have 3 shades running in Hubitat and I have them close at sunset and open to 44% at sunrise. I can also go into the device and manually open, close or set to any position I want. This has worked perfectly for at least 6 months. I am moving over to HA and would like to have the same functionality. Can this be done without the Tradfri hub or do I need the hub?
Reading through this thread it seems to give mixed results just pairing directly with ZHA.
@Ramblurr : Yes, Iām running about 20 other ZHA devices. Iām even using 2 of the IKEA repeaters outside of the Tradfri ecosystem to act as generic ZHA repeaters. Iām having no issues and I went from having constant issues with blinds not opening and closing to 100% reliability. I even think itās causing the batteries on the blinds themselves to last longer.
@ctfeet : I just tested this using the Ikea app and HA and it works as expected with the Tradfri integration. I donāt personally have a use for this feature but I do recall it working without the hub as well with just the ZHA integration.
Does anyone have binding working with the latest remote firmware (0x23079631 / V-2.3.079)? I forgot to turn off OTA after updating the blinds and there was a new release for the remotes at the end of October. They stopped working around that time and I havenāt been able to fix them.