Ikea Trådfri zigbee lights

Written by vidarlo on 20170331 in english and hardware and software with one comment.
Ikea Trådfri gateway
Ikea Trådfri gateway

So, Ikea has released Trådfri seemingly worldwide. This is a series of Zigbee enabled lights, which looks quite neat. I bought the starter kit, with a gateway, two bulbs, and a remote control.

First a couple of sentences about the remote control. It has on/off, dim up and down, and change color temperature. Nothing too exciting. If it is paired with two bulbs, and one is on and other is off, they will swap when on/off is pressed… It appears to have the advertised range of 10m, and certainly is a neat addition.

The bulbs gives the amount of light I expect – and they’re quite cheap. But the gateway is the most interesting thing. It’s a cylinder, containing ~95% air. The circuit board is imaged at left. The biggest comonent is the ethernet jack, mounted on the other side of the board:

Ethernet jack side of board
Ethernet jack side of board

There’s not many components there… Notably two buttons: one reset, and one pair button.

I fired up the android application, which appears to be using multicast (224.0.0.1) to find the gateway, and then communicates using encrypted coap (coaps). A tcpdump can be found here. Not really interesting tho, except that I’m a little bit surprised that they bothered to include encryption. Also, it does not look like it attempts to talk to the Internet. I’ve not set up logging, but I’ve checked a few times, and the device has no outgoing connections – which is a good sign in my book.

The included app is fairly basic – you can create schedules for turning on and off, and you can control lights and create zones, and control zones. That’s it – so far. In short it does what it says on the box, but not much more. I’m looking at coap libraries for python now, but sadly dTLS support seems to be missing from most of them. Same goes for node.js coap libraries…

1 Response to “Ikea Trådfri zigbee lights

  1. Hi, thank for your examination, could you please upload again your TCP dump because is not accessible now.
    Also I kindly ask you what tool you use to perform the tcpdump.
    Thanks!
    Byteman