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kea’s new Matter-ready Dirigera smart home hub is hitting retail shelves in North America and most of Europe this week, alongside a completely redesigned Home smart app. Dirigera — which means “conducting” in Swedish — is at the heart of Ikea’s attempt to infuse the home with digital intelligence. It’s meant to reflect the company’s smart home ambitions that have grown from a simple lighting hobby to a full-blown strategic focus, as important to the 79-year-old company as beds and Billy bookcases. That requires hardware and software that’s easy to setup, easy to use, and stable above all; characteristics that Ikea struggled to deliver with its original Trådfri Gateway.
I’ve been living with the new Dirigera hub for the last week, using the new app to migrate 22 devices off my old Trådfri Gateway while adding three additional Ikea devices to my new smart home setup. One hiccup aside, everything went smoothly. So smoothly that I was shocked after having suffered through years of frustration with Ikea’s old gateway which often struggled to add devices and then maintain connections to them over time.
The big thing that’s missing right now is support for Matter — it’s coming. But after some early stumbles I’m ok taking a moment to celebrate the fact that Ikea now gets the basics right, even if the Dirigera hub costs $69 / €59.95, twice as much as the old Gateway.
Ikea doesn’t offer a migration tool to move existing devices and scenes over from the Trådfri Gateway to the new Dirigera hub. That will bother some. I didn’t mind it since my existing Ikea setup had drifted into a partial zombie-like state over the last year and needed a complete overhaul. In all honesty, I was avoiding the frustration of trying to fix things that again went sideways caused by yet another system glitch or software update.
Sometimes you just have to start over.
Adding devices and scenes
Fortunately, you don’t have to remove your existing devices from the Trådfri Gateway before adding them to the Dirigera hub. In fact, you never have to open the old Home smart app (now renamed to “Home smart 1”) at all. Just follow the steps in the new “Home smart” app (available now for both iOS and Android users) to reset each device and Dirigera will find them for quick and easy inclusion into new or existing rooms. Yes, the new app is organized by rooms that map to your actual home layout, not illogical groups of devices organized by so-called steering devices like dimmers and switches. You can also bulk add devices into rooms. For example, I have three smart spotlights from Ikea on the same physical switch. I was able to reset and add all three spots at once to the Dirigera hub using the new Home smart app.
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My home has 25 Ikea smart devices in total that sit alongside dozens of others from a variety of vendors. My Ikea network is a mix of several light bulbs, switches, dimmers, outlets, and sensors; two shortcut buttons; one set of blinds; one Symfonisk speaker; and one air purifier. All but one of the Ikea devices was found and added on the first attempt despite being scattered across three floors of my tall but narrow home.
The Home smart app’s new homescreen is a simple but effective dashboard into the Ikea home. Each room is represented by a square in your choice of colors. Inside the squares are interactive icons that let you quickly control the smart devices in each room. Click the square and you’ll find more fine-tuned control over the devices within.
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The only trouble I ran into when adding devices was related to Ikea’s Sonos partnership. The first issue is related to legacy Sonos devices, while the second was a bug solved by a reboot of the Dirigera.
Sonos owners should be aware that Dirigera only supports speakers that can run the S2 operating system, making Ikea’s new Home smart app incompatible with older Sonos S1 networks and devices like the first generation Play:5 speaker. All is not lost, however, since Dirigera supports integrations with Google, Amazon, and Apple just like the Trådfri Gateway before it. Both Google and Amazon integrations support Sonos S1 devices allowing you to create cross-platform scenes with Ikea devices if that’s important to you.
My only onboarding failure with the Dirigera came when trying to add one of Ikea’s Sonos-compatible (gen 2) Symfonisk Table Lamps to the Home smart app. The Sonos S2 app found it on the first try and started streaming music. But Ikea’s new Home smart app didn’t automatically detect the new speaker as it should. After a few days of on-and-off troubleshooting that included factory resetting the speaker and moving it between Wi-Fi and Sonosnet networks, I finally just rebooted the Dirigera hub, and voila, the Ikea app found it. Ikea says it’s a bug related to homes (like mine) with both Sonos S1 and S2 networks that will be fixed with the next software release.
That one frustration aside, adding devices to the Dirigera proved to be simple and fast, with the app offering clear step-by-step instructions with useful animations to idiot-proof the entire process. Long gone are the days where adding a lightbulb to the Trådfri Gateway first required pairing a wireless switch with the bulb and then adding the switch to the Gateway in order to control the bulb from the old Home smart app. Now, a helpful animation guides the new lightbulb owner through the tedious but simple onboarding procedure.
Source: TheVerge
