@stevehooper yeah we should really try to add a direct Home Assistant integration from the Flic hub someday, since it is so popular...

In the meantime, can you use the Internet Request action in our app to send a simple http request to your device running Home Assistant maybe?

We are today announcing a Beta release of some new features in the Hub SDK that can be used together with Flic Twist.

In order to seamlessly continue to work with the rest of your smart home devices that you might have assigned to other triggers on the Flic Twist, we introduce the concept of Virtual Devices. A Virtual Device is handled by the Flic Hub firmware just like any other supported real device, but its functionality is implemented by the user in the Hub SDK, typically by writing some kind of bridge software that sends commands and receives update events over the LAN to/from the real device. If for example the brightness of a (real) light is changed by some external means, it is possible to tell the Flic Hub firmware from javascript about the new brightness level, which the hub then forwards to the Flic Twist, so that the LED status can update accordingly. That way when you twist it, it will start from the correct position.

We are also adding a "message" action that can be used to send arbitrary strings to your scripts whenever the action is triggered. The intended use case is to be able to trigger custom code also for Push/Double Push in the Selector feature or perform some action when a specific point is reached in Advanced Dimming or Scene Blender.

The virtual devices can be created in the Flic App and be set to be controlled by a Flic Twist as follows:

Using this piece of code, updates are received in your javascript code after configuring a virtual device to be triggered in the Flic App for a specific Flic Twist:

const flicapp = require("flicapp");

flicapp.on("virtualDeviceUpdate", (metaData, values) => {
    // The values object can contain hue, saturation, brightness, colorTemperature, volume, position (for blinds)
    console.log(`Twist ${metaData.buttonId} updated virtual device ${metaData.virtualDeviceId} of type ${metaData.dimmableType} with these values: ${JSON.stringify(values)}`);
});

When a device is modified externally, we use this function to inform the system of the change:

flicapp.virtualDeviceUpdateState(dimmableType, virtualDeviceId, values);

The dimmableType can be either "Light", "Speaker" or "Blind". The values is an object containing at least one of the fields mentioned above that is appropriate for the corresponding dimmableType. For example:

flicapp.virtualDeviceUpdateState("Light", "my_ceiling_light", {hue: 0.6, saturation: 0.7, brightness: 0.8});

The values themselves are always floating point numbers between 0 and 1.

Configure an action message to be triggered by assigning the following action in the Flic app:

The action messages are easy to receive, just register a listener as follows:

flicapp.on("actionMessage", message => console.log(`Got a message: ${message}`));

We'd love to hear your feedback!

We are slowly rolling this out in different regions. Stay tuned.

@bulk Yes we have made the submission.

@abboberg All our firmwarers are auto-updated. In some cases we have assigned a specific firmware to specific people on request. Please reach out to us if you want to go back to the public release track.

The current hub fw version is 4.2.11.

Usually when we update the hub firmware we also update the apps. In the apps you can see a Change log in the settings menu.

@steveff Our Matter integration is just around the corner. For the Twist this is probably most relevant for lights, as no speakers I know yet support Matter.

What we also have in the pipeline for Twist is e.g. more configurable steps (4 -> 12) for Advanced Dimming/Scene Blender so that you can trigger an action (e.g. Alexa) with higher resolution and before as well as Hub SDK features for the Twist so that you can build custom integrations.

Spotify has an API (over cloud) that we could potentially use for controlling the volume, but we are not sure if the latency will be low enough to make this action have a good user experience. We also don't like that they don't provide any means to "push out" the volume status when it is changed so that the LEDs on the Twist could update accordingly (https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Access-to-websockets/td-p/4955299).

@hello_marley the ball is moving according to plan. Please stay tuned

@giannis-yt I would guess at the moment the Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless is one of the cheapest options.

@mx5_94 Seems like a very powerful option. We'll definitely implement that!

What you should do is to first call bind, followed by setBroadcast(true) on the socket. Then you can send messages using send.
FYI, the API is made to be compatible with Node.js API https://nodejs.org/api/dgram.html.

Hi,

One of the most recently added providers is the Matter provider. Matter is a common protocol that many devices now implement so that every manufacturer doesn't have to provide their own proprietary protocol.

Matter is supported by e.g. Govee and Shelly.

@gj The new apps now display the serial number of the buttons in the button info.

@gordon-0 As the "Internet Request" action in the app is designed, it unfortunately does not contain any type of cryptographic signature that you can verify to make sure the request (when received) itself actually originated from the press of the button. The only thing you can do is to provide credentials or something in the headers of the Internet Request, but those you have to design and implement yourself.

@gordon-0 I was under the impression you wanted to use WebBluetooth or something, but maybe you are not? In that case, what is the Flic button connected to?

Not sure exactly what you are trying to do, but the Flic 2 protocol implements security up to the point where the client of the protocol is.

See https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/flic2-documentation/wiki/Flic-2-Protocol-Specification. What you can do is therefore to proxy all GATT packets between your script and a server where you want to terminate the end-to-end communication.

@starstruckpigeon is it the Android or iOS app that is crashing? What app version do you have?

@gj if you give me a list of serial numbers, I can assign a different version of the firmware which includes the serial number in the advertisement name.

Please upgrade to firmware 4.4.6 which does not have this problem.

If you use the device manager, you can manually assign a specific firmware version.

Hi, the latest Flic Hub firmware (4.4.5) now fixes this issue. The apps (in case you connect the Hue Bridge directly to the phone/tablet) will be updated later.

@gj Would you prefer to include e.g. the serial number in the advertising name?