ZHA newbee pairing question

I have a zigstar USB stick on the way to start my Zigbee journey but an IKEA bulb and control pad turned up today.
Am I ok pairing the bulb and control switch together so I can direct control it and then be able to pair and fully control, see status with ZHA later?

You canā€™t directly pair zigbee devices together without pairing them to a controller initially since you need the controller to send the config messages to the devices to pair them to each other.

Ahh ok the instructions on the bulb and control pad implied I turned the bulb on and pushed a button on the control pad to ā€˜pairā€™.

So I need the controller (zigstar) in the middle before itā€™ll work?

Iā€™m used to just pairing devices like LightwaveRF so trying to get used to how Zigbee works.

right. ā€œto pairā€ it to the controller.

everything else is done from the controller after that point.

untill then itā€™s just a dumb zigbee device waiting for a controller to tell it what to do next.

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Regardless of Zigbee Coordinator adapter type or Zigbee implementation recommend follow these tips:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#best-practices-to-avoid-pairingconnection-difficulties

and

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/18864 ā†’ https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/18864/commits/b21c49589d898d60a1a235afa7b9c148d013cfee

Note that USB 3.x hard drives and their cables are well known to be a source of interference for Zigbee.

Also, donā€™t change Zigbee channel as not all Zigbee devices support all channels, see recommendation:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#defining-zigbee-channel-to-use

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