IKEA devices - Bad support - Support request

Hi to all,
I bought some Ikea devices and I'm wondering why they are so badly or even not at all supported. The outlet is clearly marked as supported in the list, but it does not report back the state. I've read somewhere on this forum that this is Ikea's vault as the device does not report back state. I'm now for nearly 40 years a developer and I don't agree to this. Programming staff is also handling work around. Actually I do this by applying 2 workarounds. I refresh them programmatically, but guess what ? Under the Poll/Refresh command the outlets won't be available as if they do not support refresh, but in the devices settings there is a "Refresh" button (bad support). I work around this by using custom action with refresh for the device. Second, I overlay the outlet in the dashboard with a button that I made completely transparent by CSS and that calls a rule:

Only lines 2,6 and 7 are relevant for this thread.
By doing so, the outlet switches, refreshes and the tile (below the transparent button) updates state in the dashboard.

Why do I have to handle such simple things for a supported device ? I'm sure that it is easy for Hubitat to call a refresh after a command in their own driver and no user workaround will be needed. This is simply bad programming or ignoring usera by blaming the device.

I agree that a mass of users will ask Hubitat to support staff of this brand or that brand and there are plenty of different requests, but hey guys, we are talking about Ikea. One of the biggest players on the market, nearly available worldwide and that has descent staff at a very low price. I also bought the scene button (6,99 €) that is not supported by Hubitat. I use it with a user made driver (by someone saying he is no expert at all in programming, but was able to use an existing driver for smartthings and to adopt it). Unfortunately, battery reporting is not supported. If an advanced user can do it, Hubitat can do it in less time. Come on Hubitat, give us the opportunity to use nice and affordable devices.

2 Likes

Open the page for this device in the Hubitat admin UI and click the "Configure" button to run that command in the driver, which should configure the device to correctly report back its state. (This is supposed to happen on initial pairing, but it doesn't hurt to run it afterwards manually; there seems to be a common issue with this device where that doesn't happen during pairing like it should, and this has fixed it in any case I've seen reported in the forum so far.)

That should eliminate the need for your workaround. As for the "Refresh" thing, again, you should no longer need to do that, but whether it appears in that drop-down in Rule Machine is related to whether the driver for the device declares the "Refresh" capability versus just implementing a "refresh" command. (These are driver code details that aren't normally of concern, but that is the underlying difference.) Staff have stated they've done just the former on some devices to discourage this usage in RM or similar apps when the device shouldn't need it as part of regular use (which, for example, some older Z-Wave devices might). The custom command will work in any case, but the underlying issue could be that, or it could be an oversight...

3 Likes

I've done this multiple times and it does not solve the problem. What the tile shows when I click on the devices is that:
image
...and the tile become stuck and I can't toggle the switch again. After refreshing the dashboard it shows the old and now wrong state.

With my workaround it works perfectly and instantly:
image

image