Get yourself a ConBee II USB Zigbee gateway (or some other universal Zigbee gateway) and plug it into your Home Assistant, you can then pair your equipment to the USB gateway instead of the tradfri. In Home Assistant you are then free to do whatever you want 👍🏻
Yep. IKEA is not super robust in a full-blown smart home solution, but they provide cheap, easily available hardware that is using generic zigbee standards and does not require a cloud. So easy to link it in Home Assistant. No programming needed to trigger that button he showed.
Came here to say the same. I threw the gateway in the bin and used a Sonoff Zigbee gateway flashed with Tasmota. Using Zigbee2MQTT on HA. The bulbs CAN be put into pairing mode (power cycle 6 times) and there is excellent template support for the remote controls. It all works beautifully. You can ignore anything with the Ikea gateway and app and just use these as standard Zigbee peripherals. It’s an awesome and cheap solution.
There are since great automation blueprints for the whole Tradfri range, however I would recommend the Sonoff Zigbee Strick and the Zigbee2MQTT integration
I use a CC2531 usb / zigbee stick on a raspberry pi as my zigbee receiver. No need for the Ikea hub and I use several Ikea products. I do understand your point about wanting home automation to be (more) plug and play. In my experience, it's still a hodgepodge mess. BTW, I use Node Red, but then I'm a developer. I know you didn't want to get into the weeds and code stuff. Excited to see your follow up videos on home automation.
The IKEA platform has many blueprint out there for Home Assistant. But you may encounter some issues with the firmware that comes with this little devices. Is well known that Tradfri Buttons and Tradfri Shortcut Button (the one you have) has many issues. Lucky for me i only bought one piece. I will replace it by Aqara buttons. I was thinking to buy some bulbs from Ikea, but now that i see the major concern about the colors i would pick some Philips Hue instead.
Looking forward to your new smart home series. My new home build is 1 month in. I plan to stick to Hue and Caseta which I have now. Of course I’ll install that stuff myself after possession. I looked into shades and pre-wiring for them. Only offerings I found were insanely pricey. Affordable options all have batteries which is a pita since I could hardwire. I’m also debating adding onto my unifi ckg2+ setup with more APs and cameras. I’m frustrated with the course unifi is taking. Currently I firewall off their controller.
I have one of the Ikea Smart blinds, and the setup process was so annoying. I've added the Ikea integration to both my HomeKit setup and my Home Assistant, and I would say it works best with HomeKit. The Home Assistant integration just randomly disconnects every few months, and then you have to add it all again. Think twice before getting into this ecosystem.
Its about time ikea made a remote that can pair with multiple bulbs but control individually. I have a logitech bluetooth keyboard that can pair with 3 bluetooth devices and remember them. Why cant a remote do that? Id happily pay for a remote thats a little bigger.
I was going to get their motion sensor and connect it to SmartThings, but IKEA doesn't deliver in my area! I'm in a decent-sized city in the US. I'm about an hour away from an IKEA. SERIOUSLY?
