How would I go about making Flic open a web page on a user's computer?

shawn.james.c

I am looking into Flic for a project where a web page needs to be opened on a computer when you press it. I think that I would make a node RED application but I'm not too well versed with JS.

I had a couple questions about this implementation.

Would the user connect the Flic to their computer, through Bluetooth, USB, or through both the flic and app communicating with the same server?
How would the user get the application onto their computer? Would they have to go to a website on their own to download it or would they be able to be prompted to do so when (and if) they connect it with their computer?
How easy would this be to implement?

johan.soderblom

@shawn-james-c Hello, this is possible using flic > ifttt > pushbullet. I tested it with Google Chrome and the pushbullet addon in the browser. When a URL is pushed, you set google chrome to open the url as default action.

shawn.james.c

Thank you for the response! I am going to present this information to my team and see how we will move forward.

Emil

We have the following SDKs for computers:
https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/fliclib-linux-hci
https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/flic-service-osx
https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/fliclib-windows

For Macintosh we also have a user-friendly app: https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/hax-with-flic-osx.

For the Mac app the user must configure it, I'm not sure how easy it is.

For the SDK/daemon variant, the solution is that we have a daemon executable running that implements a TCP server. Then we have client libraries for a couple of languages you can use to connect to the server. Usually the server runs at localhost so you can only connect to it from the same computer. You would need to implement a client application that connects to the server, implements the pairing process in a user-friendly way and listens to Flic button events. When you receive an event, you can start a browser process with the web page URL as program argument.

The user need to download both the Flic daemon and your application (you can bundle it in one zip file for example, or even make an installer). Without the software, it will be impossible to connect the button to the computer (or technically yes through some system Bluetooth settings maybe but that won't be much use since there is no software that can interact with it).