This is bad. No matter how well printed the labels are.
Did you know that if you place two Honeywell EvoHome BDR91 remote valve controllers within 300mm of each other they don’t work properly?
Neither did I. Until I woke up in a cold house and had to do some digging. Apparently the radio connections in the two devices interfere with each other. Or so the very helpful tech support person told me. I’ve moved them a nice long way apart and look forwards to continued warm toes.
Today finds us in Ikea eyeing up their Tradfri home automation devices. A year ago I bought some very cheap Teckin remote controlled plugs. I hooked these up to Amazon echo buttons so that I could turn all my lights on and off with a single press (of different buttons unfortunately but nothing is perfect).
They work fine, but the plugs use WiFi and I was a bit nervous about having my lighting controlled by a server in China. So today I went in search of something a bit better. The interesting news is that it seems to be possible to re-flash my plugs to allow them to be controlled locally via MQTT, but that is a project for another day.
After a bit of pondering I went home with a bunch of smart sockets, some bulbs, a gateway and two remote controls. And a bookcase, but that is just because when you’re in Ikea you have to buy a bookcase.
Anyhoo, this evening I set them up. It went smoothly enough. The smart devices use Zigbee to communicate. If you want you can work with just bulbs and Ikea remote controls. You pair one or more devices with a single remote control so that it is very easy to control a bunch of devices from one button. You can add a gateway that links Zigbee to your home network, and this is when things get interesting. There’s a Tradfri app that you can install on your phone that lets you group devices and control them all at once too.
This is quite good, but what I did was use Apple HomeKit (which Tradfri is compatible with) to set up all my home automation once I’d got the lights working. This lets you create “scenes” involving all your devices. The scenes can be selected from your phone or watch and you can also create automations that are are triggered by events such as sunrise, sunset, arriving home etc. It’s great fun and maybe even useful. Things I’ve learned:
You need at least one Tradfri remote control to perform the setup of devices. All the devices setup by a particular remote will be controlled by that remote.
Once you move into the HomeKit domain the distinction of devices and remotes vanishes, and you can combine any or all of your devices into scenes as you see fit.
Once you’ve set your lights to work with HomeKit you don’t need the Ikea remotes at all.
Your devices have different names on HomeKit and Tradfri, although you can change them to match up.
It is actually quite cool to be able to control your lights from your watch.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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