I have recently purchased a few items from IKEA’s Tradfri product range, a Gateway, couple of controllers and a few bulbs. Firstly it’s not a straightforward solution to implement, you can’t just purchase a gateway, a few bulbs and use the app together. You have to have some form of controller as well. So although separately the items are cheap, to get an initial solution in place and working isn’t cheap.
Gateway = £25
Controller = £15
GU10 Bulb = £7
Having said that, the binding for OH2 works great and was pretty easy to setup, although having previous experience is very helpful. I’d say intermediate level is where you need to be at, to get things up and running to a usable level quickly.
Now for my issue and why I’m posting. Much like Hue bulbs, if the power is switch off the last known state is retained for these bulbs. I did find a great example rule that worked around that for Hue bulbs and tried to use the same solution for the Tradfri bulbs, sadly it’s not worked as I had expected it to and therefore need a little help. Has anyone found a way to reset the item state of a bulb if it goes offline? I’ve also noticed that it does take some time for a Tradfri bulb to report as offline.
Yes they did get an update to return to previous state. Doesn’t work that well I’ve found. But you still have the problem within OH where you create a virtual switch or rely on a switch event in a rule.
That is true. I own couple of Tradfri devices (bulbs, switches and motion sensors) because they are kind of cheap to purchase. But to be honest I am not happy with Tradfri at all. The devices themselves are fine, but the App and the Gateway … lets say behind the state of the art. E.g. Philips Hue App provides a lot more features. And my bulbs are working great connected to the Hue network - one exception, the Tradfri colored bulb is detected wrong, color temperature control is missing.
Currently I am moving away from a specific ZigBee provider towards a general solution like e.g. deCONZ. The range of products it too big and I am not interested in buying and running tons of different “Gateways”.
If you are only interested in a solution for restoring (and remembering) the latest state of your bulbs before the went offline I recommend you to think about a persistence based way to solve it. Maybe a rule which implements the following functionality:
When the bulb status changes to online, look up the latest know state, wait a small amount of time an them and then apply the state.
I do agree with you that the Tradfri stuff isn’t as good as it could be. Clearly whoever proposed the solution had a very specific idea in mind. Maybe it was down to making things simple or providing a means of increasing revenues. Who knows.
For me a single ZigBee solution would be great and far simpler to manage. However we are far from that at the moment.
I think though you may have miss understood my original post. So let me try and explain now. In my Kitchen I have two ceiling lights, each with 4 GU_10 bulbs. I’ve also got a Dimmer to adjust them, although I don’t use it for a number of reasons. What I’ve found is that when the lights are switched on at the mains the gateway reports them as online. However if the main switch is turned off the gateway continues to report the bulbs as being online. Which means that my virtual switches don’t change to the off state. Therefore breaking a number of rules. If I make a change to the items files for the Tradfri devices they are reported as being offline if there is no power going to the bulbs.
The solution I’m hoping for is to force a refresh of the items via the binding. So that when they go offline they are reported to OH correctly.
this behavoir comes from the gateway, not from the binding. Have a look at the tradfri app. If you switch on a bulb, the app reports it as online. But if you turn it off with the main switch, it stays online. Same behavoir as in the binding.
I’m searching a solution since i’ve got my first Tradfri bulb.
All my bulbs are installed in sockets which are switched through wall switches. Cause i’m living in a rental object i’m not allowed and don’t want to change the wall switches.
It would be great if the status of the bulbs is reported so i could use it as trigger for some rules. It would be even greater if i could change brightness and color of a bulb even it is switched off, and the bulb pulls this values at the moment i switch them on.
But i think this is something Ikea has to implement.
… if you turn it off with the main switch, it stays online. Same behavoir as in the binding.
I’ve been experimenting with OH rules that act when a Tradfri bulb comes back online. As a few people have commented, the Tradfri gateway is slow to report that a bulb is offline. However there is a solution (or perhaps workaround). If you send an update to a bulb through OH then within a few seconds you will see that its status has been updated to offline.
