This is a very short story about how I managed to add the cheap IKEA Tradfri ZigBee light bulb 806 to Home Assistant using nothing but the standard Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) plugin.

Why short? It’s actually not short, but the written part of it here is short. This is my first ever video tutorial, or vLog, about the process. Please find all further details in the video below, and don’t forget to make comments and provide feedback if you have any 🙂

Why this device, and why now?

I accidentally bumped into IKEA smart home devices when looking for a sofa to buy. I found them extremely cheap, even cheaper than (or at the same price range as) the Sonoff devices. I haven’t seen any tutorial online on how to add this specific 9 SGD (6–7 USD/EUR) light bulb to Home Assistant using ZHA, so I decided to give it a try and make a tutorial about it (if possible).

What is so special in this scenario?

It is special because it requires the least amount of additional software/hardware. In particular, it does not need anything, just your Zigbee dongle that you anyway have if you have any Zigbee devices currently integrated to your Home Assistant…and that’s it.

Normally, if you don’t have anything, you will need an IKEA gateway and probably an IKEA mobile app to control the devices. Even if you have Home Assistant, the “recommended” way is to use the IKEA gateway + use the Home Assistant IKEA app to integrate them together (via WiFi).

What I don’t like about WiFi-based smart devices is that they usually need to go through a cloud system outside of my premises (probably through China, EU, or US), which causes me a lot of privacy-related headaches. So, whenever I can, I want everything to be Zigbee based, and let me do the heavy lifting of universal access on my own smart home; thank you 🙂

More on this here