I have the IKEA Tradfri gateway connected to my node-red. It is very easy to control a lamp.
I have no idea how to get input from the IKEA Tradfri dimmer button.
Is there someone out there who did it?
Is this what you are looking for.
edit: Maybe not, it doesn't use the Ikea gateway.
Thanks for the hint. I found this too, but it uses a Zigbee device for the USB port of the Raspberry Pi and a zigbee2mqtt software. Clever, certainly.
But there are special Tradfri nodes for node-red which I use already to control the lamp. I'm able to send commands to the lamp via the Tradfri node-red node. But I am not clever enough to figure out how to read from the gateway.
Maybe I am missing something fundamental in the concept.
My plan was to use these simple dimmer devices to control all sorts of stuff via the node-red home automatisation.
Im not sure but I think if i remember right those ikea dimmer buttons don’t actually talk to the base but instead directly to the devices they are supposed to dim/switch. Same goes for a lot of the battery powered Zigbee remotes like Hue or the Lightify one.
Its been a while since I dealt with Zigbee but i think those remotes make use of features build directly into the Zigbee standard for direct communication of devices within the mesh without actually talking to the mesh controller.
What Zigbee2mqtt did was „hack“/ work around this limitation to capture this communication and make it available controller side.
I could be wrong for the tradfri button but this could be the case.
Johannes
It makes a lot of sense to me and explains the symptoms.
My plan was to use these cheap buttons as input to the home automation system. Currently the dashboard is for manual input, but quite often one page contains just one or two buttons to switch lamps or the rain water pump. It is so much simpler (and easier to explain to my wife) if there is a button on the wall wich you can press for a light to go on or the waterpump to start.
Currently in some cases I use the button of the sonoff devices, but they are plain ugly with a WAF of zero.
So if someone has some hints in this direction, this would significantly improve the acceptance of my wife for all the time I spend with node-red 
Have you looked at enocean? They have Buttons which are without a battery. Once you have one of the enocean usb adapters there is a node for nodered which is not the most user friendly but i can help you get it to work.
Otherwise have you looked at this one:
which can talk to nodered via http or mqtt.
I ve had really good experiences with a lot of shelly products but haven’t used that one.
Thanks for the two hints.
I just bought a shelly lamp, did not look at the buttons yet. Those from IKEA looked nicer and were cheaper, higher WAF factor (if it is from IKEA, then it must be ok).
I do know about enocean, but did not study it in more details. They make quite a loud click noise, but for buttons outside of the house this is acceptable. I will have a closer look at this.
What I basically need is a hardware version of the node-red inject button, battery powered and nice to look at. I initially thought this is a very simple task...
So, important, cannot be neglected. I have built our home automation "fully invisible" to the family, no human interactions needed, then it finally got acceptance
Anyway, back to your buttons, I also like those from IKEA (myself being Swedish) and I think you are right, they would be accepted both from design and simplicity point of view. The feeling when you touch/press them is important and they should not feel "cheap" or make any "noise".
But maybe it is necessary to pair them with another controller instead of the IKEA gateway to get access to the events?
Well get one of the Cc2531usb sticks from ebay where you can get them quire cheap and alteady with the right firmware for zigbee2mqtt.
See how you like and maybe you will even move all your devices from the ikea hub over to zigbee2mqtt.
Its quite easy to set up and very easy to integrate into nodered over mqtt.
This would also give you the future possibility to use additional zigbee devices from other manufacturers which could be a nice addition to beeing able to use the tradfri buttons.
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Went to eBay and bought a stick with external antenna, with the most recent firmware.
This seems to be the start of an interesting journey.
If you have a Hue hub you can use the Hue Dimmer to trigger node-red events using the HueMagic nodes. I can confirm that you can't pair the Tradfri remote with a Hue Hub, but you can pair it with a Hue bulb directly.
It looks like the IKEA dimmer button is just half the price of the Hue. Besides, the IKEA thing is more discrete
I bought a CC2531 USB-Zigbee Stick from itstuff.eu, plugged it into my Raspberry Pi, installed zibee2mqtt following the excellent guide from www.zigbee2mqtt.io and then paired the IKEA Tradfri dimmer by pressing 4 times the reset button and watching the red light glowing.
Then monitored with MQTT Explorer and voila: the button press events show up.
Success!
Victory!
Now nothing can stop me from adding more and more buttons to my node-red home automation.
The dashboard is nice. Also input via Telegram is cool.
But nothing beats a simple button if you just want to switch on a water pump or a light.
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Wonderful! I like those buttons from IKEA, they are also not too expensive, discrete in design
I do have a z-wave stick but I did not build my home automation further with those gadgets, the pricing for z-wave is simply...ridicilous
Besides using Shelly wifi devices that I really like, I would for sure select Zigbee for many reasons. One is that IKEA decided to go for it, they will put a nice pressure on the price level
PS did you purchase the sniffer stick or the ready made stick?
I got the one with the newest firmware and with an external antenna.
Although I'm not afraid of flashing firmware on stuff, for this new field where I have no expertise I want to spend my time on node-red working with the incoming events.
It's money well spent: just plugged it in and it worked.
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