Hi,
I received my set of 4 Flic Twists at the beginning of this week and after playing with it I have some suggestions to make it more usable.
My main purpose is using them to control a Sonos Amp which in turn feeds my ceiling speakers in a different room. I've watched the Sonos example video on YouTube but the setup there is fairly limited.
What I want to be able to do is the following:
- Use a simple Twist to control the volume (possible).
- Use a Push to play/pause (possible)
- Use a Push & Twist to go to the previous/next track, start certain playlists and radio stations (possible, but very cumbersome).
The last part is what bothers me. In the YouTube they use Advanced Dimming for this, which actually doesn't make sense at all. Advanced dimming remembers the current "dimming" position and fills the entire light ring to the position you have twisted. This makes selecting actions at certain position more difficult than needed as it is less visible what you are doing exactly. The set of actions you can configure is also limited.
Then you have the Selector option which does make it a bit easier. But you only have the option Basic or Advanced. And the Advanced option always let you Twist through all 12 options even if you only have configured like 4 of them. And it also required at minimum a Push when selecting an option.
So I have the following improvements in mind. Could be a new selector type, or it could be configurable options for the current Selector type:
The current Selector for the Twist could be improved the following:
-
Add an option to reset to the top after selecting. Now it remembers its last position, but if you have simple commands on different positions then you might want to alway start from the top. Could be part of configuring the action. So that for each action you can say if it should reset to the top or not afterwards, or a simple global option for the selector.
-
You can choose between basic and advanced. That's either 3 or 12 options. But what If you need any number in between? Maybe when you have chosen for the advanced option only show and twist through the options that have an action configured. E.g. If you have an action at 2 o'clock, 5 o'clock, 7 o'clock and 10 o'clock it should only let you twist through those.
-
When in the selector, trigger an action without needing to push. Simply select the option. And after a timeout of a few seconds the option simply blinks shortly and then the action is executed. If you changed your mind and don't want to perform any action you simply twist back to the top to cancel.
Further more, it would also be great if the entire platform is opened a bit more so it can be tightly integrated with Home Assistant without having to resort to Internet HTTP actions. Maybe create at least a Home Assistant target application?