This will be a mini review of the 30W IKEA TRÅDFRI driver, that I use for lightning in my display cabinet.

I recently bought a new display cabinet, and thought it would be a nice touch to add some LED lightning inside it. After searching the web for different solutions, it turned out that an IKEA plug and play solution would cost roughly the same as something DIY solution with driver, controller and LED light.
The IKEA TRÅDFRI driver have a built-in controller, but I will call it a driver for the rest of the review.
It can be run with the IKEA smart home controller or controlled from a remote, but as always, I focus on Home Assistant, so that’s the only way I am using it.

The IKEA TRÅDFRI driver comes in both 10W and 30W versions, and I got the 30W version. It uses 24V, so I suppose other brands 24V LED’s could be connected, but IKEA uses nice small plugs to make it easy, and I am not sure it would be easy to connect something else to the controller. There are plugs for 9 light on the controller.
One of the very nice things about this being an IKEA driver / controller, is the energy usage. When idling, it only uses 0,34W and its got all the certifications you want, so you don’t have to worry about your house going up in flames because of a poorly designed power supply.
It’s very simple to connect the IKEA TRÅDFRI driver to the supported IKEA light. I bought IKEA SKYDRAG lights, and they where 2mm too long for the cabinet, so I had to adjust them with a hacksaw, but then it was easy to fit them in the cabinet with the included accessories.

The IKEA TRÅDFRI driver uses Zigbee to communicate, and after powering it on, allowing new devices to join on the controller, it was just a matter of pressing the reset button for some seconds, and it joined my Zigbee network flawlessly. (I am using Zigbee2MQTT)
It exposes just a single light to Home Assistant, that can be dimmed and turned on/off. You cannot control multiple lights individual on a single TRÅDFRI driver, they will all do the same. You can do over-the-air updates via Home Assistant, and you can change the power-on behavior.

The first driver i got made too much noise when the light was dimmed. IKEA had great customer support and send me a new one free of charge, and it’s much better. It still makes a little noise when dimmed, worst at ~50%, but when you step 1-2 meters away, you won’t notice.

I usually run it dimmed to 1%. It would have been nice if it could dim a little more in some situations, but for my use case, the light output running at 1% is perfect acceptable. You don’t get any options to control RGB colors, which will be a bummer for some people.
As for size, I feel it’s a little bigger than it needs to be, and I don’t understand why the cable attach thing should be separated from the driver, why not just put the ports on the side of the driver, like they do on the 10W version.

Conclusion:
The IKEA TRÅDFRI driver provides a very easy, simple, and safe solution to something that can sometimes get a little complex when you have to build it yourself. The hardware is plug and play when combined with compatible IKEA lights, and the Zigbee integration into Home Assistant works smoothly. With the current price tag, I will highly recommend the IKEA TRÅDFRI Driver, but I am fully aware that it won’t fix every possible scenario.