Thought it may be helpful to document my journey with the new Ikea Dirigera control which I purchased to replace my old Ikea TRADFRI Gateway . I use it to control the Ikea lights in my Ikea Kitchen. When we rebuilt the kitchen the Tradfri gateway connected to Apple Home but over time this stopped working. In case your wondering, I needed the Ikea lights to work remotely as the light switches in my kitchen are poorly placed and rewiring was not a viable option. Also the other half my lights in the Kitchen work perfectly using Caseta by Lutron including integration with Apple Home. So here are my installation steps:
Nov 3 2022 AM
I am currently running IOS 15.6.1.
- I prefer to work on an iPad rather than an iPhone so I installed the Ikea Home Smart App on the iPad. This however did not work as the prompt to accept the license agreement does not display on the iPad but did work on the iPhone. So iPhone it was.
- Ikea suggests plugging in the Ethernet cable first and then the power cord. The unit boots and the white light on the top pulses. If this does not happen, push the factory reset button (which I did not have to do).
- I connected the remote Tradfri wireless dimmer first – it connected with no problems.
- I then tried to connect the TRÅDFRI Drivers which physically power the lights, which I could not get to connect. I was expecting something to come up stating that since I already had a Tradfri Gateway I would need to migrate to the new Dirigera but no such luck. So then I disconnect and powered off the Tradfri and was able to connect the Tradfri Drivers. Then I set the drivers to be controlled by the Tradfri wireless dimmer which worked. So now I have the lights controlled by the dimmer using the new control unit.
- I tried connecting the new Dirigera control unit to the Apple Home App and this failed (control unit not found) which is what happened with the Tradfri Gateway. As Matter is not fully rolled out yet by Ikea nor Apple this was not unexpected.
So now we wait.
Nov 3 2022 PM
After others have said they could connect their Dirigera to HomeKit I did some more research and someone on Redit casually mentioned that you could only connect a Dirigera to HomeKit within the first 10 minutes of a Dirigera boot. So I shut it down (by pulling the power cable out) and then added it as a new control unit by scanning the QR code on the back and it worked with IOS 15.6.1. Now all lights function within HomeKit. What a way to organize things – no documentation and no method of finding this out. Thanks Ikea.
Problem solved.