Home Automation — IKEA Trådfri Gateway with LiDL Smart Plug
International supermarket chain LiDL recently announced their smart home line of products. Among other things, it includes a Smart Power Socket (a.k.a plug) that works on Zigbee 3.0.
Just like the other Home Automation ecosystems in the market, LiDL has its own smart Gateway that acts as a bridge between the smart devices and a LiDL Mobile App. Furniture conglomerate IKEA also has its own line of smart appliances and its own Gateway. I own an IKEA Gateway and some associated smart appliances. And like many others I hate the idea of buying gateways/hubs even though the devices more or less use the same communication protocols (Zigbee, BLE, WiFi). So the idea was to cross-connect Lidl Smart Socket with an IKEA Gateway.
Although the LiDL Smart Socket pairs with the IKEA Gateway, the IKEA Home Smart App does not allow operating the Socket. In order to get the Socket working, we need another integration that can relay the commands to the Socket to turn it ON or OFF, through the IKEA Gateway. There could be other ways, but I was able to get it done with “Google Home” as well as with “Home Assistant”. This article is a brief of stitching all this together.
