Hi all,
I’m new with Zigbee but for try somethings about ZigBee on my Openhab 2.5, I bought a ‘Silvercrest Gateway’ form lidl:
I don’t love proprietary clouds and internet connections for any single home automation device, but testing the Silvercrest device, I found that: https://paulbanks.org/projects/lidl-zigbee/
The solution is just I need! Then I hacked it and on Openhab I installed the Zigbee Binding. Then after some Issue on tty port and socket, I succesfull configured the haked device as Ember EM35x Coordinator.
After configuring the coordinator, I needed a Zigbee device to try something, then I bought a cheapest Ikea Tradfri switch:
The switch is simple to pair with te coordinator, and now is present as thing in my openhab.
But…
As reported here:
The switch is recognized. I can see the information about Battery charge level (percentage) or Battery Voltage, there is also a channel for (i suppose) a warning in case of battery low, but the channel used to carry the switch action is not configured properly.
Also I tried to use zigbee2mqtt, but I was not able to configure zigbee2mqtt with my coordinator, so I switched back to the Zigbee openhab binding.
In the Issue 357, is cited the PR:
that seams already merged on Zigbee Binding code, but the thing created by UI (PaperUI) discovering is not editable, I don’t understand How I can correctly configure the device channel to act as “input” and not “output”.
Assuming that there needs to be a change to the Thing because of an update to the binding, simply delete the Thing and rediscover it in the Inbox. That will recreate it with the new changes.
It’s possible…
But the UI show the channel as regular channel and is possible to link it to an Item.
The Experimental Rule manager do not show this channel as trigger channel.
I need to try with normal textual rule.
I have the same experience with these.
I have a bunch of them…
When “sniffing” the mesh it seems like they use some form for broadcast, but I do not know how “standard” they are.
Would be great if one could use them.
I have not found the time to investigate more.
Oh, one more quirk with these;
They sometimes empty the battery quite fast.
I suspect that they sometimes do not go into sleep when they should.
I know the battery behaviour was marked as a bug in the other zigbee frameworks at one time.
It looks to me like the switch is waiting for something after inclusion(?) and do not go to sleep.
When included and then been fiddeled with, they seems to use battery in a more sensible way
I mention this as it can be nice to know if someone look more into this switch/remote,
I found a thread about hue dimmer, similar to the tradfri switch.
Teorically functions are the same.
I haven’t seen before a thing with trigger channel, so my question is: Are trigger channels shown in grey like in the picture present in this thread?
Ikea tradfri switch Is a “standard ZigBee” device, but no channels in gray are present.
Yep.
Another clue is that when activated, you get a channel event in the events.log as also shown in that thread.
You tend to get events from devices like handheld remotes, that don’t “do anything” of themselves except say this button pressed, that button released.
For something like a self contained dimmer, we’re generally not interested in buttons being poked but more about what the dimmer part is doing - it’s at 50% now, next it’s changed to 75% etc.
Share a screenshot of what you get, it might help.
As reported in the following snapshot, no trigger channels are present in the thing, and also no events are added in the event log when the button is pressd, in any way (short, long, duble, …).
The dimmer channel reported as “Level Control”, do nothing. I can’t use it in any rule and linked to a dimmer Item do not reflect any change.
Seems to there some problem to convert the Zigbee entity to a thing with proper channels.
Others strange channels are the “Battery Level” and the “Battery Voltage”. In this case “Battery Level” could be the “Signal Level”, and “Battery Voltage” correctly the battery voltage. I suppose that becuse is trange using 2 channel to say the same thing, and because linking this channles to Items, show somethings like “2.9 (V)” For Battery Voltage and “49%” for “Battery Level”. A CR2032 battery at 2.9V is 95% to 98% of charge.
