Is it really not possible to use the tiny ikea dimmer, as intended? i mean, is it not possible to dim in (automatically) incremental steps, when longpressing, as it does when paired to the “dumb” trådfri hub? is it only possible to “pair” the dimmer with bulbs via flows and steps-dimming, fx long-press off–>dim 50% / long press on–>increase 50%? Hoping for some good answers, thanks
That’s the part you’d create with flows
Hi Peter, sorry, English is not my native language, and thanks for replying. What I meant with ‘automatically’, was that it would dim seamlessly when longpressed, without me having to make any flows for that specific action, or at least that there was a card for that function as there’s an on/off card :). It seems, to me at least, unnecessarily difficult to achieve a functionality that works out of the box in its own ikea-ecosystem.
That’s how Homey works, it doesn’t support “advanced” Zigbee features that all other Zigbee controllers support so you have to create flows that can somewhat mimic the required functionality (albeit in a very crude way)
Yes, it’s just that I’m surprised it’s considered an advanced feature. One other thing thats confusing, is that the dimmer that’s connected to my kitchen light (led strip via led transformer) does exactly what I would expect. It dims as before. How is that possible? All devices are Ikea.
Br Christian
It’s not, that’s why I put it in quotes
There are two ways this can work: the remote sends broadcast messages to a particular Zigbee group, and your LED transformer is part of that group (so it listens to those messages and acts on them), or the remote is bound to the transformer (meaning they have a “direct” connection with each other).
Most Zigbee controllers have a way of assigning devices to groups, or to bind them together, but Homey doesn’t, so it’s either a group broadcast or the remote and the transformer were bound to each other by IKEA (usually happens when they are sold as a pair).
FWIW, group broadcasts can also cause problems between brands: some Aqara devices will send messages to the same groups as IKEA, so it can happen that using an Aqara switch will inadvertently switches IKEA devices on or off. Again, when this happens you can’t fix this with Homey since it also lacks the abilities to remove devices from a group.