"IKEA of Sweden TRADFRI control outlet" detected as Light Dimmer, should be Switch

I am using an updated openHAB 2.5.0.M5 (openHABian on rPi 3+) with the latest Zigbee binding and a HUSBZB-1 stick and PaperUI.

The IKEA TRÅDFRI Wireless control outlet is detected and added with the OpenHab Zigbee binding as “IKEA of Sweden TRADFRI control outlet” with Category “Light”, Type “Dimmer”.

This works but the switch doesn’t provide gradual dimming of a lamp connected to it, for example. It will only turn on at >1% or off at 0%.

I was able to get expected behavior after changing Category and Type to “Switch”.

This has been discussed elsewhere, but the issue is that the device reports that it supports a dimmer, so the binding provides control of this service and you get a dimmer channel rather than a switch. A dimmer can always be used as a switch, so you still have the same functionality.

Unfortunately short of modifying the binding to add a specific handler for this device to change how it is reported, there’s not a lot I can do I think.

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Thanks for clarifying this, and thank you for your work on this!

I also initially thought its dimming property was a normal feature… I just can’t seem to find how to use it. As soon as the Level control is 1% or more, the light just turns on, that’s it.

When paired to a steering device such as the round remote Control or the square ON/OFF dimmer (I tried both), the dimming capability of the switches is not used / passed to the switch.

Perhaps it’s a firmware bug from IKEA ?

I am just glad I could change it to use it as I’ve intended initially.

My guess is that they are providing support for this to make it more widely usable - ie so that devices supporting dimmer commands can control it even if they don’t support switches. That’s a guess though - I don’t know what was going through their minds :slight_smile: .

I will take a look to see if there’s something else I can do to change the way this works. I could potentially use another piece of information to change this as the device also reports what type of device it is (and this device does report that it’s an ONOFF plug - even though it also reports that it supports the level control dimmer functions). What worries me is the opposite happens - ie a device reports that it’s an ON/OFF switch with dimmer support, but it’s really a dimmer and we don’t provide the channel to a user. In an ideal world, everyone would follow the standards, and we’d avoid these sort of issues, but in the real world, there are always these sort of ambiguities.

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