Link lights and remote directly in Deconz

If you not want to be depended of your deconz zigbee gateway is up and running all the time to get your lights working, then keep on reading……
In this blog post I will show you how to set that up in deconz / Conbee 2. This article is inspired from this site. But it was not straight forward for me. So this is the reason for this post.

I’m running deconz on a raspbeyy pi and a conbee 2 zigbee stick connected. I already have my lights and remotes paired in deconz. So instead of going to each light and pair the remote manually, then you can follow this approach.

The first thing we need is to get access to the deconz api. To get that, we need to get an access token.

In chrome you can install an app called “Postman”. Go to the chrome apps store -> search for “postman” and install it.

We need to prepare Postman. Enter the following tings, but DONT CLICK SNED YET.

1. Run “Postman”
2. Enter the IP address of your deconz /api. Ex “192.168.0.50/api”.
3. Set the query to POST
4. Click RAW
5. Enter { “devicetype”: “MY APPLICATION NAME” }, where MY APPLICATION NAME is a name of your own choich.

Log into the phoscon website, ex http://192.168.0.50/pwa/login.html, and click on the tree lines:

Then click Gateway

Click Advanced

Click Authenticate app. This will give you 60 secounds to fire off the command in postman.

Go back to the postman chrome app and click Send

You will not get the token that you need to continue:

Open a new tab in your browser and paste this into the address bar:
http://<deconz hostname>/api/<user token>/groups ->
http://192.168.0.50/api/0123456789abc36/groups
If you are using deconz in home assistant you will need to add port 40850 to the url. Ex: http://192.168.0.50:40850/api/0123456789abc36/groups

Then you will get all the groups on your deconz:

You need to find the ID (1) for the remote that you want to pair directly with the light. You can do that by the name (2) or the uniqueid (3). If you have more then one remote, then you have to use the uniqueid, because the name is properly the same for all your remotes. (At least it was for me). You can find that in the application “Hue essentials” for iOS and Android. Find your remote under “Devices” -> click on the remote -> Click … -> “details” -> look at the “Unique ID” section. Then you can search for it on the webpage.

I will not cover other option in Hue Essentials in this blog post.

Now that you have the ID for your remote. Then open a VNC connection to the deconz application. You can do that by downloading a VNC viewer -> make a new connection:
Address: 192.168.0.50 (IP address of your deconz)
User: pi
Password: raspbeegw (Default password. if you created another one, use that)

Now that you have a connection open to deconz, find that light that you want to pair with the remote -> click on the right . on the light -> click on “0004 Groups”.

Click on the “Cluster Info” at the bottom in the gray windows to the left.

Find the HEX number for the ID of your group. In this example the ID was 1, so the HEX will be 0x1. You then add the HEX number in the “Group ID” box -> Click exec. Then you will get a confirmation if it was successful.

After you have paired the remote, you can login to deconz and see the link between the remote and the light:

If you want to change/remove or add lights to the group, then you can do it in the deconz webinterface. You don’t have to do it via VNC.
Only the group with at least on light have to be created via VNC, after that you can managed it in the deconz webinterface.

Now try to power of the deconz box and test if your switch still can turn on and off the light.
This will ONLY work if you are using the default bottom layout of the Ikea remote. If you have programed the bottoms to control other things, then it will start to act strange.
Please remember that it will use the default layout of the remote. So if you are using a Ikea remote and have customized that in deconz, then it will revert back to the default bottom layout. And that also goes for Per Mejdal Rasmussen custom remote.

Hope this guide will get you started to make sure that you light always work, even thought if the deconz zigbee gateway is down. (And that always happens when you are not at home. So the WAF is way down :-))