Ikea Symphonisk dimming lights

Configuration Zigbee
1

First of all thanks to who ever wrote ikea rotary encoder integration mentioned in the blog. Ever since I saw it I’ve wanted to test how it would work as a light dimmer.

So I bought the Ikea dimmer, connected it with zha and tried to control hue lights connected to a hue bridge. The setup was easy (thanks!) but the actual behaviour is not bery useful.
Anything beyond controlling a single light seems pretty much unusable.

Trying to dim a hue group sets all the bulbs to the same brightness instead of increasing or decreasing the individual bulbs brightnesses. The response is also quite slow.
When controlling individual bulbs the commands don’t stay in sync at all and the response is even slower. I’m guessing the bridge gets flooded with too may requests and starts dropping them.

Also the actual adjustment from the ikea dimmer behaves oddly. It doesn’t matter how fast or how long you spin the disc, the adjustment is always the same. I can keep spinning it like grazy for a minute and it adjusts a little. That combined with the slow response just doesn’t work at all.

Has anyone actually used this and gotten it to work? Would it help to move the lights to zha instead of hue bridge?

2

Hi @probus,

I recommend you to take a look to ControllerX. It is an AppDaemon app responsible to bind controllers with lights and media players. The configuration is as easy as 5 or 6 lines of YAML code, and no need of HA automation. With the following configuration (in apps.yaml) you have the E1744 (symfonisk controller) up and running with a group of lights:

example_app:
  module: controllerx
  class: E1744LightController
  controller: <your IEEE device>
  integration: zha
  light: group.<your group entity ID>

With this, you have the following behaviour:

  • 1 click: Toggles the light(s)
  • 2 clicks: Turns the light(s) to full brightness
  • Rotate left/right: Dim/brighten the light(s)

You can find ControllerX in HACS. Let me know if you try and if you have any questions :slightly_smiling_face:

Best,
Xavi M.

3 Likes
3

Thanks for the tip! ControllerX looks like a cool project and will definately come handy. Unfortunately while the symphonisk controller seems to work a little bit better configured this way, I would still not consider it good enough for normal use. The adjustments just feel way too laggy and slow. It also has the same problem that all the bulbs in the group are set to the same brightness. I’ll probalby try to move some lights to zha and see if the responsiveness is any better than with hue bridge.

4

Hi @probus

Thank you for trying ControllerX out and for the feedback. Maybe you think is laggy and slow because of the default parameters, you could try to change delay and automatic_steps.

5

This is the configuration I have with deconz and the symfonisk controller.

example_app:
  module: controllerx
  class: E1744LightController
  controller: symfonisk_sound_controller
  integration: deconz
  light: light.office
  delay: 200
  automatic_steps: 25
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