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Hacking IKEA TRÅDFRI products, such as light bulbs, window blinds and other accessories.

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Hacking IKEA TRÅDFRI

Introduction

The IKEA TRÅDFRI family of products provide you with several home automation solutions that interconnect using Zigbee Light Link. While the line-up initially only included lighting products, it includes power switches and wireless window blinds as well.

Many of the TRÅDFRI are quite simple. For instance, if we take a simple light bulb, it contains:

  • Power supply
  • LED driver
  • IKEA TRÅDFRI module

The IKEA TRÅDFRI module is used in many of their products, and is actually a small piece of circuit board with a few GPIO pins exposed. These pins are then used to control the LED driver.

The goal of this project is to provide information about the IKEA TRÅDFRI modules and products, so you can start hacking them. For example:

  • Take apart a light bulb, and use the module board, to control your own lighting solutions.
  • Create custom boards for wall-mounted switches based on their dimmer buttons.
  • Patch the firmware to dimming capabilies.
  • Repurposing the modules by writing your own firmware.

To find relevant products, I have compiled a list of IKEA TRÅDFRI products in PRODUCTS.md. A teardown of has also been provided for some products.

TRÅDFRI modules

So far, a few variations of the TRÅDFRI modules have been identified. They are all using microcontrollers manufactured by Silicon Labs. The modules that have been identified are:

  • ICC-1
  • ICC-A-1
  • MGM210L

Front of IKEA TRÅDFRI module (ICC-1) Front of IKEA TRÅDFRI module (ICC-A-1) Front of IKEA TRÅDFRI module (MGM210L)

Some other products, such as the line-up of remote controls, have a dedicated circuit board that integrate a microcontroller directly (i.e. no separate module board).

More details and pictures on these modules can be found in MODULES.md.

Product teardowns

Be sure to check out the PRODUCTS.md on more details on products that have been reversed-engineered. There are product teardown photos, schematics, firmware dumps, firmware analysis and more.

If you have any products not in the list, please contribute! If you have any teardown photos, firmware files or other information, I'd like to add it to the list.

Firmware hacking

The TRÅDFRI products use an ARM Cortex M-series microcontroller. There are plenty of tools for these types of microcontrollers to get started on reversing firmware files and write your own firmwares.

  • Find dumps of firmware files in the OTA folder.
  • Checkout the RIOT-OS folder for more information on custom firmware development. You can use this as a starting point.
  • Reference information on dumping firmware images here.
  • Learn how to inspect the firmware for reverse-enginering in this folder.
  • Build a development board for easy access to a TRÅDFRI module's pins.

Other hacks

Some people have came up with alternative uses for the TRÅDFRI modules. Here are a few:

EZSP Zigbee coordinator

It is possible to load the Silicon Labs EmberZNet Zigbee coordinator firmware on an ICC-1 or ICC-A-1. This allows you to use the module to set-up your own Zigbee network.

MattWestb has provided a guide and firmware here.

Zigbee router

Several users have modified the TRÅDFRI routers to improve the performance, by adding an external antenna.

This applies to the ICC-A-1 modules only, but it should be very interesting if a the TRÅDFRI routers will use the newer MGM210L modules, because they offer a solder pad for an external antenna.

FLOALT brightness hack

zw has patched the firmware of his FLOALT LED panel to have an improved range of brightness levels. A guide to perform the firmware patch has been contributed here.

Shortcut button "no double press" hack

Simon has patched the firmware of the E1812 shortcut button to disable the double press feature, getting rid of the 400ms delay on single presses.

DOOM

A version of DOOM was port to the IKEA TRÅDFRI MGM210L modules, including a custom contrller. The project is documented here and the source code can be found here.

Sources

I have gathered some information from the following sources:

License

See the LICENSE.md file (CC-BY-4.0).

Safety

Some TRÅDFRI products are mains powered. If you don't know what that means, then stop right now. Please read this for more information on working safely on mains-connected devices.

Disclaimer

This page and its content is not affiliated with IKEA of Sweden AB.

The purpose of this project is to learn and improve using reverse engineering techniques. Use this information on your own risk. You will void your warranty.

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