Fun with the New IKEA Smart Devices
I picked up the new IKEA smart gear this week, and I have been grinning at it ever since. There is a KAJPLATS bulb, a GRILLPLATS outlet, and two flavors of BILRESA remote, a two-way switch and a scroll wheel. They speak Matter over Thread, they cost IKEA money instead of boutique money, and they drop straight into Home Assistant without a proprietary bridge. That alone would have been a fun weekend.
Then I read the quick-start card. IKEA clearly designed this for people who do not own a hub. You switch on the bulb, pop batteries into the remote, hold the two about two inches apart, and press the pairing button four times. They find each other and the remote just works. For a normal household that is genuinely great. No app, no account, no homework.
The Two-Inch Touchlink Surprise
The catch is what is happening under the hood. That hubless trick is Zigbee Touchlink, and the moment it succeeds, both devices step off the Thread network. If you had already added the bulb to Home Assistant over Matter, it disappears. I did exactly that, and then spent a few minutes wondering what I had broken. Nothing was broken. I had just chosen a pairing path that quietly ignores my smart home.
Matter QR Codes and the Missing Binding
So I started over and used the Matter QR codes, which is honestly a lovely experience once the phone cooperates. A few taps later the bulb and both remotes were sitting in Home Assistant, happy on the Thread mesh.
Now for the part I was most curious about. Matter has a real idea called binding, where a switch can talk straight to a light without a hub in the middle. I love that idea. So I opened the Matter Server details for the scroll wheel, hoping to set up a direct link to the bulb. What I found was a Generic Switch device type and no Binding cluster at all. IKEA used Zigbee for device-to-device pairing and left Matter binding out. In Matter mode, every button press travels to Home Assistant as an event and an automation has to tell the light what to do.
My first reaction was a small groan, because I now had a stack of event entities and a house with more than one remote. My first two automations even got crossed between an office remote and a desk lamp remote.
Blueprints to the Rescue
The fix turned out to be pleasantly boring: Home Assistant Blueprints. I wrote one for the two-way switch, where a short press on the top button turns the light on, the bottom button turns it off, and a long press steps the brightness. I wrote a second one for the scroll wheel, where the center press toggles the light and each scroll tick nudges the brightness up or down. Each Blueprint asks for the remote and the light, and that is it. Adding a new remote to a new room now takes about a minute, and nothing gets crossed.
Because the press has to hop through the hub, there can be a short lag on early firmware, so I set transition times to zero and used a queued mode to keep things snappy. I can live with that, and I bet IKEA will smooth it out over time.
What I love about this moment in smart home gear is how many layers there are to peek at. Cheap hardware, two radios in one chip, and a design choice that makes you think about who the product is really for. If you want to follow along, I wrote up the full pairing steps and both Blueprints, ready to copy and paste, over on By Design Won't Fix in Pairing IKEA KAJPLATS and BILRESA Devices Over Matter-over-Thread and Building a Home Assistant Blueprint.
Later,
SteveO