Flic (https://flic.io/) is another IoT button, claiming to be the world's smartest button.
Since I’m always interested in new gadgets, especially when they are home-automation-related, I decided to order a 4 pack.
Shipped from Sweden, so it arrived a couple of days with UPS Express.
Some unboxing pics:
They claim the adhesive sticker on the back of button can be used more than once.. Haven’t tried that yet.
The downside, as for home automation, is that they work on Bluetooth LTE and require a phone with the companion app installed.
Luckily I have an old Samsung S4-Mini that’s always connected to power & WiFi (don’t ask me why).
They are working on some kind of bridge, that’ll make it easier to use the buttons without a phone.
Pairing the Flic button with the phone was painless.. It gives you a wide variety of actions to perform when you either press, double press or long press (hold) the button.
Check out their website for an up to date list of integrations.
My domotica setup is using Philips Hue, Homewizard (433Mhz/868Mhz hub), some made custom software, Ubiquity MPower and Domoticz running on a Synology NAS to link everything together..
So I added one of the Flic buttons as a dummy hardware device in Domoticz (on/off switch)
Using Airdroid it’s easy to configure the button using the app on the phone. You can tell it to send HTTP requests, so I’ve configured it to switch the virtual Domoticz button on and off:
After that I could simply create an event in Domoticz to handle the button clicks:
The result is that I now have a tiny little button that can turn on or off all lighting in my living room, including the ones that aren’t connected to my Hue bridge, like this work of art:
The final result is that I now have a button on the wall that can toggle my living room lighting. The next step would be to configure the long press action to change the lights into a different scene.
But seeing the result on my wall it looks a whole lot better than the big ass Hue button:
I still have to see how long the battery will last (the Hue switch works on kinetic energy and doesn’t have a battery, which is a big plus!), but all in all my first experience is quite positive.
I plan to use some of the buttons in my car, to control my phone while driving. I do have a car kit to make calls or listen to text messages, but there’s no other integration. So having a button to skip tracks in Spotify for example would be awesome...
To be continued…
