I can't adequately explain why, but I grabbed an E1766 off eBay (as I don't think they're sold separately to the blinds). The driver has been updated to v1.11 and released through HPM now, so go ahead and update, it's "properly supported". It came with the 2.3.079 firmware, so I couldn't test anything earlier.
If anyone fancies sending me one of these E1743 buttons that they've given up on I'll see if that can be added to the driver too. I'm going to see how long the battery lasts in this E1766 and then likely turf it into the drawer with the rest of my Tradfri collection.
Could be. It would be nice to know what's going on. The Xiaomi buttons confuse me too - they're far more reliable (on my dedicated mesh for them) than these IKEAs but none of them use the repeaters according to the Hubitat routing table. However, if I take a repeater away - hell to pay. They hate it. Weird things.
Cool beans. I'll grab the updated driver tonight. I'm going to set the two foul buttons back up. I have an Xbee3 setup now so I can map and see what network differences there are.
EDIT: Well, I thought I was going to set them back up, but I'm out of batteries. I'll order some more 2032s. If I get some time tomorrow, I'll wire up some AAs just to get back to testing.
Another note, my second "good" button killed the battery after just two days of sitting in my wife's office after being connected for over a week without noticeable battery drain. One thing I noted is that the only "good" button left is going through a GE Zigbee light switch. Any button in the wife's office will route through one of the three nearby Ikea repeaters.
My theory...the Ikea repeater is constantly polling the button or the button is constantly trying to send something to the repeater. This "thing" is maybe something specific to the Ikea hubs that Hubitat doesn't even pick up.
Pure speculation of course...I'll try to some more testing...including forcing my naughty buttons to just through non-Ikea repeaters to see if the drain remains.
I've just tried setting this up with some E1766s I've had sitting in a drawer for years (after updating them via a Dirigera hub to 24.4.5. Added them to hubitat, then after that installed the driver via HPM and selected it for the remotes.
It looks like they added fine, but there are some things that are confusing me. Only a few are reporting battery, none seem to be treating a button press as "activity" and the one that shows activity I don't believe has had any button presses.
I haven't played around much, including I haven't tried connecting the buttons to trigger anything, but I thought it'd be worth sharing.
Thanks for this as well, this is a lot closer to working than they ever have been before.
Someone on the home assistant forum noted that they made a change to the ZHA configuration so that the ikea buttons cannot connect directly to the coordinator.
This supposedly resolved the battery drain issue.
Not something we'd have access to on Hubitat though.
I haven't had a chance to try this myself on my HA install.
Apologies, if this is a wrong discussion group. I have E1810 5-button button and trying to find Hubitat C7 driver for it. Any help ? or I am simply out of luck.
I’d heard they were incompatible with the way in which Hubitat passes on messages to custom drivers, so I’ve never bothered picking one up.
Now, from our recent work with the previously-incompatible blind control button it would seem this may not be the case with IKEA’s newer firmware. However, nobody has yet overcome the bizarre battery drain issues, so I give hope with one hand and take it away again with the other.
Hey there, no, I’ve not got one I’m afraid. Given the blind controller gives me the same battery issues as the rest of the Tradfri kit I’m not hugely enthused about spending more time on them at the moment.
I’ll keep an eye on other projects though, and will definitely take another look if a battery solution appears. Thanks for the offer of sending one - it’s likely to cost you more than the thing’s worth to get it to the UK!
I don't mind at all, it's the least I can do for the community and especially people who are actively working to make things better for the rest of us. I got the buttons free with the blinds but ironically am using Sonoff buttons to control them (single tap to open - double tap to close).
I also have the dimmer but I am afraid it suffers the same fate as the button with the battery drain though I have not yet tried updating the firmware on it.
With the Tradfri repeater, would it be possible to keep the "Get link quality", "Get route table" functions back with your presence driver?
That's typically how I test if the repeaters are actually responding on the network and other troubleshooting.
I updated my two repeaters to this driver, both show present even though I know one is misbehaving. How long without a check in before it changes to not present?
The link quality should be doable. Never done the route table so I'd need to research how to get that data.
Should be 30 minutes or so. From the code it's set to expect messages every 10 minutes. It accepts that one message may be lost and then the check only runs every few minutes, so ballpark half an hour for these.
There were some big updates to the firmware on these devices at the end of May 2023, with the E1744 sound remote being updated to v24.4.5 plus the E1716 and E1812 being updated to v24.4.6. Battery optimisation and stability improvements are the touted features.
Now here's the rub. To update you either need to unpair the devices from Hubitat and pair with an IKEA gateway, then wait patiently for days, or unpair the devices from Hubitat and pair with a Zigbee2MQTT system and push the update using the OTA feature. Or you could implement OTA firmware updates for IKEA devices in Hubitat... no, I didn't fancy doing that either.
But if you go the Z2M route these very drivers can be used with my MQTT routing driver without bothering to update the firmware at all. They work perfectly.
The choice is yours!
BTW, all of these drivers have now been updated to support the healthStatus custom attribute, so will no longer misuse presence as a means of reporting device connectivity. Use @kkossev's Device Health Status to give yourself a nice system overview.
I never got to the bottom of it on HE, I'm afraid.
There's new firmware out for IKEA devices which mentions something about battery life in the changelog, but I've been using mine connected via Zigbee2MQTT for nearly a year. Since I paired them with that rather than direct to HE, all my battery woes vanished.
My most problematic button was for the loft (attic) lights. That's had the same battery since March and is currently reporting 73%.
I'd love to hear if the new firmware helps, though.
