Flic are small Bluetooth 5.0 buttons, about the size of a US quarter but thicker. There’s no official integration with smartthings, but they have their own mini hub which you can use with HomeKit or Ifttt or to trigger Amazon routines (the first third-party button to do so). We use a bunch of these at our house. They use Bluetooth 5.0 means they should be more reliable and have longer range than older generation Bluetooth devices.
They just released a new SDK which will allow you to write JavaScript to run on their mini hub, letting you create your own integrations.
This should open up some integration possibilities with smartthings and the new platform, depending on exactly how you use it.
The buttons themselves are expensive, but really well engineered with replaceable batteries and three functions per button: press, double press, and long hold.
They also have an IR blaster, but I don’t know if that’s exposed to the new SDK.
They offer a lot of different bundles and occasionally run sales, usually around holidays. List price for a starter kit of the mini hub and three Bluetooth buttons (no IR) is $160.
The buttons used to come in different colors, but now they are all just flat white and you can get an icon sticker if you want. I think we have about nine of them now, acquired at different times on different sales. Maybe a dozen, one of my housemates likes them.
Get out of my head! I was just reading this email. Looks interesting. In theory, I believe that means you can run a SmartThings scene via the SmartThings API from a Flic button.
Yes, I think so too, but haven’t seen it confirmed yet. This is a very smartthings groovy type approach to customization, it looks like they have some nice prebuilt functions. Anybody who is comfortable with Webcore ought to be able to use this.
Just reading up on these. Needs either the Flic hub or your mobile phone to work. Does not integrate directly with any (current…) Amazon Echo, uses your phone as a ‘man in the middle’. AFAICT…
It needs either the mini hub or your phone to be home, but your phone doesn’t have to be home.
The mini hub (which is really small, about the size of a deck of cards) has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It communicates with echo cloud to cloud, same as smartthings does.
What’s new is that these are the first third-party buttons (not sensors) which can be used as the trigger for an Alexa routine. It is a cloud cloud integration, but it’s still very cool.
The mini hub does, like all certified HomeKit bridges, work locally with homekit. So there is that potential, I just don’t know exactly how everything works with the new SDK.
i was reading this email and my instant thought was how i could get flic to integrate with smartthings or at least bypass amazon alexa to some devices as its very frustrating that with alexa you can either turn something on or off not just toggle state. which is annoying.
hopefully someone who is capable can come up with a way of utilising this sdk and teach me (or let me steal the code).
Looks interesting. In theory, I believe that means you can run a SmartThings scene via the SmartThings API from a Flic button.
