I received my Fabriq speaker yesterday and installation was like breeze. It went well and I’m using it with Bigtalker right now.
I have one problem though, battery life? Even when i’m not home and so the speaker isn’t getting used at all, within 8 or so hours battery is dead.
I can not always keep it connected with power, as with the design if I connect it with the power, pushing the Alexa/echo button is little inconvenience.
Are you guys Fabriq’s battery life the same? If so what do you do? Is their any way around with power connection so that it can always be powered on and yet pushing the mic for alexa doesn’t seem like I’ll break it, lol.
Yes battery life isn’t great. I contacted the company and asked if I can keep it connected to power and they said yes. So I have it setup for that. I plan to make a CoRE piston that turns on the charger every three or four hours, keeps it on for 1 hour then off.
Yes it does.
If we keep it connected, how do you press that little mic icon? I mean yes you can press it, but doesn’t it get pushed against the microusb charing pin?
How do you keep that ‘flap’ with buttons of mic, sound, play/pause close?
Plus I also have problem of delay. I was using lannouncer before and there was minimal to no delay. but with Fabriq and mediarenderer_connect there is delay of almost a second.
Is there any workaround it? Can I decrease the delay somehow?
I have a Echo Dot mounted on my ceiling so I don’t use this for Alexa most of the time. When I do it is in portable mode. I have a Echo in my family room which is open concept, so from any room adjacent it works. When I am in my bedroom I use Reverb app on my phone.
I keep my speakers plugged in all of the time, don’t have enough controllable outlets to rig up an on/off system to cycle the batteries.
When I push the mic icon (or the play/pause/volume) I slip my index finger under the flap and push the button with my thumb. This supports the flap and gives good feedback of a button press. It would be cool to find a micro-usb cable plug that fully inserts with a flat/flexible ribbon cable end that allows full closure of the flap.
I’m not the first person to think of this, based on my quick search…
Who wants to buy one of these and try and cut it up and solder a usb A connection?
Thank you for the reply.
But adding this puts the total cost way over dot’s 50$.
The only thing this Fabriq can offer in addition is DLNA rendering which in my case is delayed by more than a second. Most of the time, opening event is skipped and all it plays is door closed event.
I think just for the Bluetooth capability, I can get better speaker in $40.
I’ll probably return it.
Yeah, everyone has their own use case. So far I’m only using one tts event and it works. I don’t care about not leaving it plugged in.
And I like the multiroom audio which echo doesn’t currently have, and I like not having an always listening speaker that presumably can be wiretapped at any time, for privacy reasons.
Just got one of these and it is working, however the ring of lights flash white every couple minutes. Anyone else have this problem? Will not get wife approval till I can solve that issue
I reached out to them and told them how annoying the flashing light is and how it serves no purpose. They said they are aware of the complaints and in an update they would include an option to turn it off. That was months ago.
Ahh great, I updated it to the latest firmware version, but still has the issue… Such a pity to have to tape it up @Natec, but I guess that is what I will have to do
“In response to your question, we have investigated further into this issue but it is a hardware fix, therefore it will not be introudced until new models are put on the market.”
I find his total bs. If they can write code to make it flash they can fix it so it doesn’t.
It was working great for TTS at first, but now I have “no present” as the status listed in the SmartThings app. I can’t change the status by tapping on the speaker icon in the device settings accessed by tapping the gear icon on the device page in ST.
I’ve rebooted the speaker, no change. Any tricks to make the speaker available again?
Yes, it shows up when I go back to discovery - no problem there.
Damn…OPERATOR ERROR!!
I must have renamed the speaker at some point and forgotten - it’s now named for the room it’s in and comes up under that name, and no longer says “no present.”
I just rebooted my router coincidentally as part of troubleshooting, and that cleared the old instance of the speaker out.
Gotta run to an event, but hoping/assuming this means things will be back to normal…
Came back home and speaker was still showing “no present.”
Removed it from SmartThings, added it back in (that works OK), found it w/the Media Renderer Smartapp and selected it.
Back to My Home screen in app and it still shows “no present.”
In the IDE device page same info - switch off, no device present.
The Fabriq app shows the device online and I can play music on the speaker from the Fabriq app, and I can see the device on my network in my router management pages. Everyone says it’s there and ready to go except SmartThings! <eek!>
