@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.

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. You need to manually construct the Authorization header. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication.

@buckyswider _matterc._udp is for commissioning, so that one is only present while the device is "pairable", typically 15 minutes after boot when the device is factory reset (i.e. no Matter pairings yet).

_matter._tcp shall be advertised after the device has been commissioned (paired), one service per "fabric" (i.e. per "hub" it has been commissioned to), as long as it is powered on and connected to the network. If it does not advertise this service, it will not be possible to reach it by Matter controllers. If you don't see this service when you expect to, it seems like a bug in that device.

Maybe you have devices from other Matter brands you can test with?

@buckyswider yes, assuming your phone/tablet you run the app on is connected to the same network as the flic hub and the Matter device, all Matter devices that are currently paired shall advertise that service, regardless of if it's connected or not.

@buckyswider We have planned to add network packing logging to the hub in order to be able to debug situations like this, but have not yet had time to do that. The Flic Hub runs a DNS-SD listener in the background, waiting for its paired Matter devices to come available, and then connects to these. So the first step you can do is to use any DNS-SD app (like this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.druk.servicebrowser) and verify that your device is there. Matter devices advertise themselves under the _matter._tcp service.

@djadin14 maybe you got a defect unit. You should contact support at https://flic.io/support and see if you are eligible for a replacement.

@j that is the simplest way to get automatic access to your flows. You can probably set up your manual web hooks if you want, using the http request action, but you need to manually enter the url.

@j the homey action is cloud based. The Flic Hub communicates directly with the Homey cloud servers.

@kerry-thacher the action should definitely be there for Flic 2 buttons, as long as they are directly connected to a phone/tablet (not through flic hub).

@gabrielmgrossman Please file your issue to https://flic.io/support.

The problem is that groups can be pretty dynamic. You can hold the play button on one player and it automatically joins another group that is playing music in your household. And with the sonos app it is easy to move around speakers between different groups. That said, it is possible that a group id that was valid when a flic was configured might not be valid after a while after grouping back and forth.

That's why we think it's more simple to pick a player you want to play on, and we will then at runtime when the action is executed check which group that player belongs to and play on that group. May I ask in what circumstances this strategy is a bad idea?

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