Here I’m modifying an Ikea Tradfri Wireless Dimmer switch, one of the cheapest Zigbee buttons on the market at £6, into an industrial mechanical switch.

I wanted a rugged button to control some smart home devices, the Fibaro The Button, whilst looks great, IMHO it’s over priced at nearly £50. This post looks to create a much cheaper alternative and have some fun with a soldering iron along the way.

The Ikea button is tiny at 45mm x 45mm, 16mm deep and runs off a single CR2032 coin battery. It has 2 micro switch based buttons that can detect either being pressed or held within the SmartThings environment.

Let’s take this this button apart and see what’s inside. Before doing any modifications (at your own risk), I recommend you first pair this device with your existing home automation environment so that you can test the buttons are working correctly.

Ikea Tradfri Wireless Dimmer Teardown

Circuit board

We can add a mechanical switch inline across either the purple or red terminals shown below on either of the onboard micro switches S1 or S2.

I decided to completely remove the micro switches and hoped to use their existing copper pads, but in removing them, the copper seating got damaged so I needed to put the new inline switch for S1 across one existing switch pad and R7 and the S2 switch from one remaining pad to R6. Then used some hot glue to secure the new wires connections in place.

Industrial button

I used this industrial style switch, which I got from Ebay for £7, which had just enough space for the Ikea smart button circuit board and battery casing. It was then a simple case of putting the wires for both the S1 and S2 switches in either side of the new mechanical switch terminals. Note on this particular switch, one button is Normally Open (NO) and the other is Normally Closed (NC). So the NO button detects both being pressed or held, and the NC button detects being held within the standard SmartThings Ikea Button device handler.

New mechanical button

The final result, a light weight industrial switch.