Vera-tradfri

A plugin for the Vera home automation controller to manage IKEA Tradfri devices via a Tradfri Gateway. The following devices are supported:

• Light bulb
• Outlet (power plug)
• Blind (experimental, not test on real device)

Due to technical limitations of the Tradfri system, it is not possible to capture events of a remote control, motion sensor, dimmer or sound controller. These directly control linked devices, so only the effect of an action on a remote can be observed when a light or outlet state changes.

Installation

• Copy or upload D_TradfriGW.json, D_TradfriGW.xml, I_TradfriGW.xml and L_TradfriGW.lua.
• Copy or upload S_Color1.xml, S_Dimming1.xml, S_EnergyMetering1.xml, S_HaDevice1.xml and S_SwitchPower1.xml.
• Get D_DimmableLight1.xml, D_DimmableRGBLight1.xml and D_BinaryLight1.xml files plus the .json variants from your Vera and copy or upload these when you use openLuup.
• Add a new device by clicking Create on the Devices page. Use D_TradfriGW.xml as the definition filename and I_TradfriGW.xml as the implementation filename.
• Wait for the new device to appear.
• Configure the IP of your Tradfri Gateway in the ip attribute.
• Lookup the SecurityCode on the bottom for your Tradfri Gateway and enter the code in the corresponding variable of the created device
• Restart Luup and your devices should appear after a short while. The SecurityCode attribute will be cleared after successful authentication to the gateway.

At startup or Luup reload, the gateway device icon will show with a red outline. After a short while (5-20 seconds) the outline becomes black, which means a connection is established with the gateway.

Control Panel

Besides setting the Tradfri Gateway IP address and SecurityCode, no configuration is needed. The Control Panel tab of the device that represents the gateway offers several advanced functions:

• Reboot: Will reboot the Tradfri Gateway (the hardware device, not this plugin).
• Factory Reset: Will request a factory reset of the Tradfri Gateway. This will reset the gateway hardware to the factory defaults. All connected devices will be removed and will require linking again.
• Commission: Will put the Tradfri Gateway in device commissioning mode to link a new device (typically a remote).
• Debugging: Activate debug logging for the plugin
• Update devices (poll or observe): The default behavior of the plugin (as of version 0.2) is to poll the Tradfri Gateway regularly for the status of the connected devices. The polling frequency is configurable via the device variable PollInterval, it specifies the poll interval in seconds. The Tradfri Gateway also supports observing via CoAP. This however is an experimental feature that is not always very stable. Using observe may cause regular reboots.

Limitations

This plugin relies on CoAP, the protocol that the IKEA Tradfri gateway uses. The Lua configuration that ships with Vera does not include support for this. For now, this plugin is supported for use with openLuup with AltUI as available as the Docker image vwout/openluup. To use this plugin on a random Linux system, install the Lua library libcoap as Debian package: luacoap-lua5.x-0.2.0-Linux.deb.

Known issues

• Instability when using observe for device updates
• Polling many device on a short interval (less than 10 seconds) may cause issues on devices with a low limit on the maximum number of open files (less than 1024), e.g. a Raspberry Pi. The solution is to increase this by adding e.g. fs.file-max=4096 to /etc/sysctl.conf.