Onboarding IKEA Tradfri Zigbee button

An IKEA Tradfri dimmer is able to control more than one light, if used without a Smartthings hub.

If the dimmer is joined to Smartthings hub, it can no longer be used to control lights directly (the pairing instructions ask to factory reset the dimmer button).

Is there a way to configure the IKEA Tradfri dimmer to simultaneously control directly (including dimming) one or more lights, and be usable as an event trigger in a SmartApp/Automation?

You can use Smart Lighting or ABC Advanced Button Controller to assign dimming to the actions (press or held).

Yes, it can be done, and there are existing discussion threads about it, but some people find that the handheld controller keeps stealing the lights from smartthings and they become unusable from the app or other automations.

Technically it is possible for a secondary remote to broadcast directly to some specified zigbee devices, this is a typical way of using a Hue dimmer switch, for example, But in practice smartthings doesn’t tend to maintain these connections and you end up having to redo the pairing every once in a while.

(This is called “multicast binding“ in Zigbee, by the way.)

But just look for the existing threads on this specific device, there’s a lot of discussion.

It works that way with the 5 button IKEA remote and both the bulb and the remote stays useable with SmartThings.

The IKEA dimmer 2 button remote unfortunately not working like that. It connects to the bulb by TouchLink, but it loses reporting to SmartThings but the battery.

In both cases bulbs are staying controllable from ST.

But it might matter what Firmware the bulbs and remotes have. Pre Zigbee 3.0 or Zigbee 3.0.

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Ah!

If it’s using ZLL touchlink commissioning to bind to the bulbs then, that’s potentially an issue because the smartthings hub itself doesn’t support ZLL. Or touchlink commissioning. All of the hub models support ZHA, and the newer ones support zigbee 3.0

So it sounds like a model – specific issue where it’s switching to an incompatible zigbee profile.

The 5 button remote was designed to the bulbs, and it has a ZLL profile by default as I remember, meanwhile the Dimmer was released together with the socket, what has a ZHA profile.
Pairing to bulbs is done by TouchLink, I don’t know any other way how it could be, as both remote supports a reset pairing by pressing the button on the back 4-5-6 times (I cannot remember how many times.) , that’s how them can be paired to the Hub. And they do support a long press (10+ seconds) pairing to the bulbs. They have to be close to the bulb when paired. So it must be TouchLink.
Zigbee 3.0 sets everything to ZHA, as I understand, but keeps the backward compatibility with ZLL and TouchLink ad well.

Most IKEA devices has already Zigbee 3.0 firmwares, but an IKEA Hub/Bridge is required to upgrade.

All IKEA Tradfri release notes can be found here.

https://ww8.ikea.com/ikeahomesmart/releasenotes/releasenotes.html

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A device with newer firmware could be using zigbee 3.0 touchlink commissioning instead of ZLL touchlink commissioning.

When ZLL was first introduced, The requirement was that the device be able to fall back to a ZHA profile if added to a network with a ZHA coordinator. But it was left up to the individual device manufacturers how exactly to handle that. Some, like The first version of the Hue dimmer switch, actually had two different Zigbee endpoints, one for each of the two profiles. But that would still work as long as the device itself was smart enough to know when to switch between them.

Once Zigbee 3.0 came along, backwards compatibility is handled a little differently. Basically the device looks like a ZHA device to a ZHA coordinator, but it isn’t. This smoothed out some of the integration issues. Touchlink commissioning remains optional, but it doesn’t flip you out of the profile the way the older method did.

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Indeed the TRADFRI remote control is ZLL:

01 C05E 0830 02 06 0000 0001 0003 0009 0B05 1000 07 0003 0004 0005 0006 0008 0019 1000

The TRADFRI on/off switch is ZHA:

01 0104 0820 01 07 0000 0001 0003 0009 0020 1000 FC7C 07 0003 0004 0006 0008 0019 0102 1000

But I have pre Zigbee 3.0 firmwares only.

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ZHA doesn’t support touch link commissioning, though. That has to be using either a ZLL profile or a zigbee 3.0 profile.

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