Trådfri integration - How much control?

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 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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 ?

Now I’m running with only the remotes and sensors on the conbee dongle using the ZHA integration… Ikea bulbs are on the Ikea hub, and Phillips Hue bulbs and others are on the Hue hub… This seems to be working pretty good right now… Just don’t hope theres too much delay on the sensors

Hi francisp.
I also have some problems with slow response on IKEA TRADFRI bulbs and IKEA integration.
If I pair them with my zigbee2mqtt network, response is OK.
But how do you implement the standard behaviour of the IKEA remotes? Is there an easy way (automation/pluin/…) to have exactly the same behaviour as the standard IKEA remotes? light up/dow, color change, etc…

grtz
B

Have a look at controllerx.

1 Like

Hi @bartplessers,

I remember I helped you set up this with Native HA Automations with YAML and a Python Script. However, I took that further and I created an AppDaemon app that I also linked in the original post where I help you out (Please help: automation for IKEA TRADFRI remote control (E1524/E1810)).

If you have any problems installing or configuring ControllerX, just let me know. I will be glad to help you out :slight_smile:

Regards,
Xavi M.

Hi @xaviml !

Of course I do remember your great help on this!!!

I will give it a shot in the weekend if I find some time.

Just a bit frustrated on the standard integration of IKEA hub in home assistant.
HA is my hobby project, and I love a lot of features. But experimenting also means that HA is not always online. So I was trying to have “standard” functionality with out-of-the-box IKEA hardware.
And some fancy extra features with the help of HA. I don’t want to rely fully on HA for basic stuf.

However, for some reason the IKEA integration is not alway reliable. I have 4 servers (dev/quality/production/dr) in my own home, without any problems. All running on RPI But in my other home, the IKEA integration does not work so well. Latency, or if the IKEA hub is rebooted, you have to reload the HA integration, etc…

But sInce I’ve only read good things about Controller X, no doubt it will be a pleasant experience this weekend :slight_smile:

grtz
B