Can only enroll four Flics at one time

pdo.smith

I have six Flic Location Singles.

I can initially connect all six Flics to the Flic app but I can only ever use four at one time.
If I reset the Bluetooth subsystem all six Flics will show as disconnected, which is to be expected. When I press the button on a Flic it will connect, once again as expected. But once I have pressed the fourth button the remaining two Flics will not connect and their red light flashes twice.

This behaviour is independent of which Flics are used. It is always the first four Flics which are connected and the remaining two Flics cannot be connected.

It seems the Flic app has a limit of four Flics which can be enrolled at the same time. This is a severe limitation for me, considering the intended use. I intend to use them as panic buttons, positioned in various rooms and will need eight in total(for the time being). The Flic will send messages, via smartphones, through the Artik cloud to alarm devices, alarm monitors and security personnel. The smartphone will be running the Flic app and a custom app using the Flic SDK.

I can get around this problem by using more than one smartphone in the facility but this increases the complexity of administration.

It is really important, to me, to be able to enrol more than four Flic buttons.

I hope that there is something quite simple that I can do to fix this problem otherwise I urge you to remove this quite arbitrary limit as soon as possible.

Next I will try out using a Raspberry Pi as a hub for my buttons.

pdo.smith

@joacim thanks for your reply. What you say makes sense since the smartphone manufacturer normally will not expect many concurrent Bluetooth connections to the phone. The RPi can support 10 concurrent connections so I will be using that.

Joacim

Hi,

The Flic App(s) and SDKs have no limitations in amounts of simultaneous connections. The bluetooth implementation of the device you're connecting to sets the limits, and this varies a lot. It depends not only on OS and make, but on Bluetooth chip and stack as well.

Each Flic requires an active connection. Beacons do not require a connection, as they are simply advertising.

We never recommend using Flic buttons as alarm buttons where you would be dependant on it not to fail, no matter what. If you will do this in any case, I would definitely recommend using a RPi.

pdo.smith

It occurred to me that I had hit the limit on the number of Bluetooth connections on my phone and that this was four.

I tested this by using the Nordic app nRF Connect. It detected all six buttons simultaneously, showing the advertising interval and showing that they were all bonded. From this I conclude that my phone can support at least six Bluetooth connections.

I then activated three iBeacons and these also were detected at the same time, bringing the number of simultaneous connections to nine.