IKEA Tradfri Devices on Homekit setup with conbee II

deCONZ Setup Support
1

I am stuck making use of some IKEA devices I bought, hoping to integrate into my Homekit-based automation using Conbee II.

I am trying to see IKEA motion sensors as accessories in the EVE or Apple Home app so I can use them as triggers for scenes. Is this possible?

So far I have:

  1. Set up a rpi 4b with the conbee ii connected over an extension cable. Gateway shows up and phoscon is accessible via raspberrypi.local. I’ve updated the firmware to 2.11.05, 26660700.

  2. Installed Homebridge and homebridge-hue plugins and added the gateway hostname to the configuration along with the hue platform. I was able to add the gateway to the Home as an accessory.

  3. Added the tradfri motion sensor to Phosocon, it correctly detects motion on the phoscon page.

  4. Used the phoscon beta to successfully add the new shortcut switch.

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I’m stuck in that neither the switch nor motion sensor show up in the Home or Eve app that I can see. Should I be expecting this?

How do I enhance existing scenes I have in Home / Eve apps to make use of newly connected sensors and switches?

2

Just checking. Have you restarted Homebridge since adding the new devices? That’s required for Home/Eve to pickup new devices.

3

Sorry to say but I gave up trying to make the conbee setup work.

I returned it and just got the tradfri hub. I was disappointed, as I got the pi specifically for this and put a lot of time in.

After the above post I realized that designing and implementing the programming for the house lighting, button and motion behavior was more than enough IT challenge.

I think if conbee had a step by step guide that showed the entire workflow across each piece of software, all the way through setup in the Home or Eve app I probably could have made it. The guide should spotlight Tradfri, and only that to start.

But I could not put any more time into skunkworks—we needed stuff working post haste and this was getting into he way more than it was helping.

One thing I found troubling was that even with the official hub, ikea’s home smart app creates empty rooms to hold the motion sensors. This is required to see them in the home app.

I’m sure this makes sense to ikea or maybe they will seek to hide this in the future but it makes no sense to me.

Also that the triple press of shortcut buttons is not supported. This says nothing of IKEA’s own lack of reasonable documentation or videos explaining setup with homekit.

This isn’t phoscon’s problem, I realize however the entire smarthome ecosystem with regard to native homekit integration is such a mess I have no idea how any but the most determined or bankrolled individuals set up a large system.