IKEA KAJPLATS & BILRESA: First impression of the new IKEA Matter over Thread lights and buttons

IKEA announced their new Smart Home line-up on November 6 with 21 new products, including lights, buttons and sensors. The biggest change is the support of Matter over Thread instead of Zigbee. With IKEA embracing this new Smart Home standard, Matter over Thread might gain more traction as other Smart Home brands also work on a shift to Thread. This includes Aqara and Philips Hue, supporting both Zigbee and Thread in their latest devices. While most of the new products are not yet available, some of the new products start to pop up in some stores. We’ve tested the IKEA KAJPLATS E27 bulb and the IKEA BILRESA dual button in several Smart Home systems: IKEA Home Smart, Apple Home, Google Home and Home Assistant.

Also check out the latest other Matter over Thread devices. like the Aqara U400 Smart Lock with UWB and the Homey Pro Mini.

IKEA Home Smart

IKEA Home Smart is the Smart Home platform of IKEA, which is built around their Dirigera hub, which supports both Zigbee and Thread. It makes sense to start our testing here. Adding both the light bulb and the button was quick and easy, using the Matter code. This code can be found on the back of the BILRESA dual button. There is also a Matter code on the light bulb, as well as on the front page of the instruction manual. After adding the lights, you can control them, choose the colour temperature, dim the lights and group them. The BILRESA button can be assigned to up to 10 lights. In our case, we decided to group 3 lights and connect them to the BILRESA dual button.

The KAJPLATS light in question is the E27 470lm version, which is priced at €7,99 in The Netherlands. We’ve mainly noticed there is not really a warm colour available. You can change to bright white and more warm yellow. However, there is not a real warm orange-like colour available for this specific light, which we normally use. This could however be different with the other KAJPLATS lights that will be available soon. The BILRESA dual button uses 2 AAA batteries, which are not included. It’s priced at €5,99. The button is quite intuitive, with a larger and smaller button. The large button turns the lights on, while the small button turns them off. A double tab on either button changes the colour, while holding the upper button brightens the lights, while holding the small lower button dims the lights. The response is quick and intuitive.

While we miss a more warm colour on this specific version of the IKEA KAJPLATS E27 bulb, everything else works smoothly and intuitive. For less than €30, you have a set of 3 lights and a smart button with Matter over Thread. Given this price point and the option to connect them without a IKEA hub to other Smart Home platforms like Apple Home and Google Home, the new Smart Home products from IKEA are definitely interesting. But Matter over Thread is mainly useful as it opens up the possibility to easily connect these devices to other platforms, which we are testing next.

Apple Home

To use the IKEA BILRESA and KAJPLATS, or any other Matter over Thread device, with Apple HomeKit, you will need a Smart Home hub from Apple with a Thread Border Router. This is either a more recent Apple TV, an Apple HomePod or Apple HomePod mini. This hub will be able to talk to Matter over Thread devices and make sure automations are executed. If you also own a Dirigera hub, you can either choose to connect the lights and button first to the IKEA Smart Home platform and share the devices from here, or just directly connect the devices to Apple Home without a IKEA hub.

Just like IKEA Home Smart, adding the devices is fairly simple and quick. In Apple Home, the BILRESA dual buttons shows up as 2 buttons with a single, double and long press. This gives you 6 different slots to connect and control lights, plugs, curtains, locks, robot vacuums, scenes or other HomeKit devices. First, we’ve tested a single press to the large button to turn our Eve Energy Smart Plug (also Matter over Thread) on, while the small button turns it off. This works flawlessly and quick, with a response within a second. Next, we set the button to control our IKEA KAJPLATS bulbs as follows:

Large button, single press: lights 20%
Large button, double press: lights 50%
Large button, long press: lights off

This set-up allows to even add another set of lights to the small button with a similar set-up. Unfortunately, this set-up caused some unexpected behavior. While the single and double press work as expected, the long press only turns off 1 out of 3 lights. Even more weird is the status of the lights in Apple Home: 2 out of 3 lights are off according to the app, while there is actually only one light off. Toggling the lights in the Apple Home app only fully turns off all three devices after several times. Adding the logic to turn of the lights with a single press with the small button, removing the action and adding them again: nothing seems to work and the lights consistently don’t turn off all at once. Most times only one out of the three lights turn off, while sometimes a second one also turns off. We also notice the lights that stay on do dim.

Until now, it’s not clear to us what causes this problem. We don’t experience any issues when using the BILRESA button with our Philips Hue lights in Apple Home. Other buttons in Apple Home also don’t show similar behavior, even not when connecting to the IKEA lights.

Besides this specific issue in Apple Home, the BILRESA dual button works fast. Matter over Thread wireless buttons are somehow still very rare, with only a few options like the Arre (previously Tuo) Smart button. Especially the price point of €5,99 makes this button very interesting. Support for Apple Home with Matter over Thread makes it a versitile button which can control basically anything you have added to your Apple Home. The BILRESA button with a scroll wheel will also be interesting to test in Apple home, as Matter does not specifically support a scroll wheel to control a light or curtain. We expect limited or no support in Apple Home for the scroll wheel itself, while it probably will work in the IKEA Home Smart app.

Google Home

We can be short about Google Home integration. Given Google Home still doesn’t support any type of Smart Buttons in their system, there is on use of the BILRESA dual button in Google Home. With a hub like the Nest Hub 2 or Google TV Streamer, you can add the IKEA KAJPLATS lights and control them like you can control other lights supported by Google Home. This works as expected. However, with no support for buttons, there is not way to connect the BILRESA dual button to the lights. There are some indications the IKEA button might support Zigbee Touchlink, or maybe Matter Binding. However, given there are no specific instructions available from IKEA on the use of these products at the moment, we were not able to check this. Let this be a reminder to Google that the support of Smart Buttons is long over due and can be a limiting factor when you like to add to some buttons to your Smart home while in the Google Home ecosystem.

Home Assistant

While we didn’t test thoroughly with Home Assistant, we did add the lights and button to see which entities are available. The BILRESA dual button shows as to events, one for each button. This indicates either a single, double or long press. It has an update entity which shows up-to-date and some diagnostic entities: the battery percentage, battery type and battery voltage. There are also two disabled entities, which are two sensors which indicated the current switch position. It’s not directly clear to us what these sensors represent.

The KAJPLATS lights have a regular control of the light (on/off, brightness, colour), as well as some configuration entities. The firmware for updates, the identify to find the light (it will blink after pressing identify), the on level (between 1 and 255), the on/off transition time and the power-on behavior on startup (on, off, toggle, previous).

First conclusions

With only 1 day of testing, we can’t conclude anything definitive. However, we do have a first impression of the new Matter over Thread line-up from IKEA. The lights are easily added to various Smart Home platforms, including Google Home, Apple Home, Home Assistant and IKEA Home Smart. You can also add them to all of these systems at the same time. When controlling the IKA KAJPLATS lights with the BILRESA dual button, the IKEA Home Smart platform works best. It was the most reliable, but also adds the option to gradually dim or brighten the lights by holding the buttons. This is quite hard to set-up in other platforms, or even impossible.

In Google Home, you can use the lights like any other lights, but there is no option to use the BILRESA dual button in Google Home. This is simply something Google needs to implement and says nothing about the IKEA button. In Home Assistant, you get some more options with the transition time and behavior on startup. Apple Home works well with the BILRESA, controlling all kinds of Smart Home products like lights, plugs, curtains and more. We still have an issue turning our IKEA KAJPLATS lights off with the BILRESA, and it’s currently unclear how to fix this and what causes this issue.

The biggest win of the IKEA Matter over Thread devices is probably the price. With €5,99 for a Matter over Thread button, it’s really cheap. This is also true when talking about the new lights from IKEA, however you already have more options available from other brands. The button is interesting for everyone with Matter over Thread devices while using Apple Home. It’s not only affordable, but also one of the few options currently available.

Most Matter over Thread Smart Home products from IKEA are currently not yet available. In The Netherlands, you can find the IKEA KAJPLATS E27 470lm at IKEA Amersfoort, while the BILRESA dual button is available at IKEA Duiven. We expect these and most other Matter over Thread devices to be available in stores in the coming months.