Best posts made by anton

• With Passive Mode the Flic button will disconnect the bluetooth LE link 10 seconds after each press in order to save battery power. The downside of this is that the link has to be established again the next time you press the button so the click latency will be worse.

• With Active Mode the Flic button stays connected for as long as possible while the phone is within range and will automatically reconnect once the phone comes into range. The idea of this is that the button should be ready to send the button events immediately when you press it. This may sound wasteful, but in reality this mode will still allow for a long battery life due to the conservative connection parameters we use.

So if you experience poor battery life on your Flic then you can try out Passive Mode. Keep in mind that either of these modes will not affect the Phone’s battery consumption. Also, I should mention that the setting is only applied on the next disconnect of the Flic (the next time you go out of range) since the connection parameters are negotiated during the connection phase.

I know that this information would have been hard to figure out on your own since it is not really documented anywhere.

/Anton

This is noted. Once we are done with all the features promised in the Hub LR campaign we will look into implementing additional features. So we will take a look at it then!

It is on our list, but I can not comment on a release date. Right now we are working hard on adding more features to the hub (as well as fixing any bugs that may arise during this initial release phase). We will have a Hub release coming out soon that adds more actions, but the Change Configuration action will not be part of that release.

Hopefully we will get to it soon though.

/Anton

I'll submit a bug and make sure we take a look at it as soon as possible. Thank's for reporting!

@brainstimulationab Actually we did implement functionality a while ago that enabled Flic to send generic keyboard events to the Android system using the HID profile. The problem that we noticed though was that Android had a lot of bugs/issues that caused bluetooth to become very unstable when using the HID profile. Actually the bugs were so severe that it would cause the phone to randomly crash and reboot. On some occasions it would even drop bonding keys randomly.. Due to this we had to make the decision to not release it. Apart from this I unfortunately do not have a good solution.

A play sound action will be made available in a later update. Our main focus now that the hubs are being shipped out is to gradually increase the functionality. We will have a V1.2.0 release of the Hub coming out shortly that adds more actions, but unfortunately Play sound will not be available in that update. However, It is likely that it will be available in the one after that.

/Anton

@f.ganninger We have found out what the issue is and hopefully we can fix it soon. Our Android developer responsible for the actions is unfortunately on vacation at the moment so it might be a few weeks before you hear anything regarding this. But I just want to ensure you that it is a high priority for us as well

Hello,

I am actually using the Cambridge Silicon Radio CSR8510 A10 dongle with my Mac Pro 2010 and it works great, although the range is not very impressive. I also know that a colleague of mine is using the Broadcom BCM20702 for his MacBook and supposedly it works great as well, but I don't have any first hand experience with it.

One thing to keep in mind is that for some dongles the Mac will not automatically switch over and use the USB dongle as the primary HCI controller. If that is the case then you will need to manually switch it over. Here is a guide on how to do that. Unfortunately Apple has just recently removed the Xcode Hardware IO tools download from their website, but if you end up needing it then I can send you a copy of it. Also, since bluetooth pairings are stored on the bluetooth controller itself it means that you will need to re-pair current bluetooth devices that you might have, such as a wireless mouse or keyboard. It can be handy to have a USB mouse at hand since the wireless one will stop working as soon as you switch the controller

/A

Thank you for posting this! It is really nice for us to hear about good use-cases like this.

I think bt .tn closed down (or similar) about a year ago unfortunately.

To your questions:

1. I believe that the output from both stderr and stdout is consumed within the Flic app. This is if I recall correctly. If so, no output is available. This could be changed in a future release, but for now it is the case.

2. To be honest with you, this is largely a business decision rather than a technical requirement. Sure, some features, such as IFTTT, Zapier, Microsoft Flow, need a Flic account in order to work, but in reality the app does not really need a login for most features. What I can say though is that once you are logged in, the app will not rely on our backend in order to work locally (at all). If our backend goes down your app will continue to work fine, unless of course you log out (in which case you would not be able to log back in again). I do understand your concern and if you truly want to have an offline solution with full control, then I recommend that you take a look at our https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/fliclib-linux-hci. Using that you could yourself fully implement Flic into a Raspberry Pi, for example. If you feel really motivated and don't even want to use our SDK, then you can also take a look at the Flic 2 Open Protocol Specification, but maybe that would require a fair bit of work.

3. This is mostly due to Apple’s App Sandbox . Basically the Flic app can not access any folder on your computer other than exactly /Library/Application Scripts/com.shortcutlabs.FlicMac. The app also does not have write access, only read and execute, which is why you have to manually place the files there.

Anyhow, I think it is cool what you have implemented. However, I will say that if reliability is critical to your use-case, then a purposefully build Raspberry Pi server might be a better way to go. It is more difficult to guarantee uptime on a Mac since it can go to sleep mode, software updates, etc.. I mentioned the fliclib-linux-hci earlier and I don’t think it would be very difficult for you to set that up, judging by the code you have already written

@b-bech-l

The reason why we cannot give you transparency is because we simply don’t know ourselves how long it will take. We are currently working with the MFi Test labs to certify our product. This MFi process is under NDA so we cannot simply share all the details on what’s going on and where we are at.

What I can say is that we have had some setbacks due to improper implementation on our end, but also due to delays caused by Covid19. Having said that, my hope is that we will have submitted all the materials/documents/samples needed by next week. After that your guess is as good as ours as to how long time it will take. We have never completed a HomeKit (or MFi) certification before, so this process is completely new to us as well.

I know that this is not what you want to hear, but it is the truth.

I also feel the need to say that even though communication with Apple has not always been the quickest, they have been very professional and helpful towards us. So I will not put any blame on them.