My better half is keen on having Chrome light switches in our house. Unfortunately I am keen to control our smart lighting with Tradfri switches. My original plan was to buy blanking plates and then simply stick the Tradfri On/Off remotes to them. Unfortunately the white plastic on the wife's chrome blanking plates look terrible.
The Tradfri remotes are two momentary switches on a Zigbee circuit board. If I can wire it to a 3 way retractive switch like this one then I can have my cake and my other half can eat it.
Tear Down
- The first step is to dismantle the IKEA on/off switch as per this guide:
- Then solder a short wire to the GND pin on the reverse - both the on an off buttons compare to GND so it can serve as the COM pin in the momentary rocker
- Then solder the switches as shown (note the orientation and which conrners are soldered closely), important to use different coloured wires here or else you can become confused.
- You can now squeeze the outer-casing back on if you thread the ground wire out carefully past the battery hole as long as the wire is thin enough, this will enable you to replace the battery
- Wire up the momentary switch, I tinned the wire ends a lot to increase the width as the switch I was using was made for much thicker wires.
- Test the switch and then install it - making sure to get the orientation as you wish!
Useful links/credits:
- http://westsideelectronics.com/ikea-tradfri-on-off-switch-teardown/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/tradfri/comments/bi3u6h/disassembling_the_onoff_remote_switch_control_for/
Pairing switches to IKEA Bulbs:
Before version 2.3.075 The IKEA on/off switches only bind to zigbee groups After they only bind to individual devices: The most reliable method seems to be: In ZHA for me that process is
- Unbind the switch from all devices including the co-ordinator
- reconfigure the device from the ZHA UI
- Unbind from the coordinator again
- Bind with the desired lights
- Re-bind with the coordinator (This ensures the homeassistant UI acutally shows the state changes)