Ikea Tradfri Gateway and Dimmer Automation configurable?

I have a question regarding a potential Ikea Tradfri setup for my home assistant.
I already have the Tradfri Gateway at home and working with my home assistant instance (no further zigbee gateways / sticks available)

I’m planning to buy the Ikea Tradfri Dimmer not to dim/turn on the lights but to start a spotify playlist via automation. (I wanted to do this via the dash button, but my last one was intentionally bricked by the firmware update in 2020)

Simplified I want to achieve this

trigger:
  service: switch.toggle
  entity_id: switch.ikea_dimmer
action:
  service: media_player.play_media
  start spotify
  ...

Is it possible to use the Ikea dimmer as a trigger via the Ikea Tradfri Gateway and to detect the button press? I’m not sure if the Ikea firmware is configured to allow me to detect such a press or if I need an “unbranded” zigbee stick (e.g. conbee) directly integrated into home assistant.
I want to be sure before driving to Ikea and getting a few dimmers that this works.

Thanks in advance for your help!

I don’t think so. In the Ikea eco-system, dimmers are paired directly to bulbs.

So what can be a possible solution for my use case:

  1. Buy e.g. a conbee or cc2531 stick and then integrate the dimmer with this gateway? Is this possible? I still need to figure out the difference between zigbee2mqtt, deConz, …

  2. Buy a different hardware button (e.g. via wifi)? Is there any recommendation for this one, that is easy to integrate with Home Assistant?

  3. A completely different approach e.g. via zwave?

Which solution is the “smarter” one? I tend to go the zigbee/zwave route even if this means, that I need additonal hardware. In my mind this is a more elegant solution than having a lot of wifi devices.

A zigbee2mqtt stick or a conbee2 will work. My Ikea dimmers work with Zigbee2mqtt.

1 Like