I want to move back to use my IKEA gateway instead of my Conbee 2 stick as its atrocious with stability in either ZHA or deconz at the moment, but I’m not sure what I will be able to control with the Ikea integration. Will i be able to make automations from events of remotes? Or is there no control of remotes at all with that integration?
I think the IKEA Tradri integration can only be used for lights,at least I see no mention of remotes in the docs anywhere.
What stability issues do you have with deconz? I use it now for over 2 years and it has always been one of the most solid pafts of my home assistant setup. Do you have enough powered devices in the zigbee mesh?
Well deconz is just not behaving like it should for me. I’ve attempted to get it to work for over 6 months, switching host system, extension cords, zigbee channels, integrations (zha and deconz), signal is fine, and firmware is updated on bulbs and conbee 2 dongle. Currently I’m on deconz, and take this example: I have 5 ikea GU10 bulbs turning on via ikea sensor. The sensor registers movement correctly and turns on 4 of the lights. One remains off, even though its in the same group as the other 4, and the group is what the automation is set to turn on… The next time it might be 3 only, and its a different bulb(s) that doesn’t turn on every time… And its the same when its the other way around, and an automation is turning them off again… Sometimes a single bulb or two remains on, while the rest is off… phoscon and home assistant report the bulbs as being in the state according to what the automation is trying to set them in, but the reality is something different. And this is how it behaves everywhere in the house not just that example. But honestly, I’m done wasting my time with that anymore… 6 months is more than enough already, and I’ve heard others having trouble with states too, so yeah…
A shame that the Ikea integration doesn’t allow remotes to be worked with. They do appear as entities though it seems, but there is no event bus added, so guess theres no way of controlling them
Zigbee2mqtt works with the deconz stick. Maybe try this one ? it works great with my Ikea bulbs
Thanks for the suggestion, but honestly, it was the same i was told with ZHA, when i used deconz the first time, and it wasn’t really any better. So I’m over my conbee stick
Are these lights bulb in a group created by HA or Deconz? If it is the first then it’s probably due to too many requests sent to the zigbee mesh (it sends one request per bulb, whereas with a group created in deconz it only sends one request to the stick which is then automatically routed to the repective bulbs in the group), which can quickly lead to lost requests, which leads to lights not turning on. Do you also have the popcorn effect that not all lights turn on at the same time?
I’ve tried both already. Both a group in Home Assistant and group in deconz, and when i was using ZHA a group in there… It does behave differently for each type of group, but common of them all is that its not consistant… in ZHA sometimes nothing would happen when the sensor saw movement… I could see that the automation was triggered, and the state of the group was on while no lights was on.
Popcorn effect has only happened very rarely
Ok, that’s not what I observe here. What you could also do is, move your light bulbs to the IKEA hub and leave the remotes on the conbee.
I use the IKEA hub, and I can see the remotes, but they only give me a battery sensor, so I can not use them to trigger anything. Also, I don’t think you can turn off the default stuff they are triggering on the IKEA hub, so even if you could see events from them in HA, you would still need to stop whatever event they were configured to execute through the IKEA hub.
What you could do though, is to use the action they are causein as a trigger. E.g. If IKEA light X is turned on (presumaby by the remote) then do X
And btw. You can also control blinds (not just lights) from the integration in HA.
The moment (and reason) I started using Conbee II instead of the Ikea hub is when I got my first motion detection. Ikea lets them connect directly to the bulb and limits your options to:
- turn on light when dark / always
- at turn on, give 100% brightness or 30%
Where with a Conbee II you can connect them to HA and then use (read) the dark/light sensor and receive the triggers and do anything HA can.
Yes, but then you always need to turn on a light, even if you just want to e.g. lower the volume on the TV.
Yes. But unfortunately I have not found either a way to disable the default action of the remote, or to get the remote events into HA.
I’d buy a zigbee stick and ditch the IKEA hub 
Well. I dont have a problem. I have one IKEA lamp and one window blind. And I control them solely from HA (I am sure I have the IKEA remotes somewhere, just don’t know where…).
So my suggestion to the OP is to ditch the IKEA remotes. Buy some cheapo 433 MHz remotes, bluetooth buttons, zigbee, zwave, whatever, and control the IKEA gear with them through HA.
Why should he ditch the IKEA remotes for other zigbee remotes? He can’t use other remotes with the IKEA hub and if he can integrate other zigbee devices through a stick, he can also control the IKEA remotes.
The Conbee dongle i already have will be the closest i get to getting a zigbee stick for a while. Its simply not stable enough in my experience, and I’m not willing try anything else for a while too. I need to have a home where a simple thing as turning on a light is not a nightmare of a hassle. And at least having the bulbs on the Ikea hub or Hue hub was always rock stable
Too bad that you have such a bad experience, for me it’s rock solid.
You could still try pairing the bulbs back to the ikea hub but keep the remotes paired with the conbee stick, so that you can still use the remotes like you did before.
That is actually what i was planning to do now. All my Ikea bulbs will be on the Ikea bridge, and all the Hue bulbs will be on the Hue bridge… I will then add the remotes to the Conbee dongle, but right now my virtual machine completely halts if i start the ZHA integration and choose the USB dongle… It freezes so much so that even the console of the virtual machine on the host system is unavailable …
I had all the lights and remotes on the Ikea hub and the Trådfri motion sensors in Deconz on ConBee2 - worked fine with automation in HA.
I also moved everything to Deconz, and now I’m struggling with the Phoscon groups/rooms not working when the stick is offline…
How do you expect it to be working when the stick is offline ?