Ok so I’ve been tinkering with the idea of Flic buttons for a while.
Flic 2 have potentially got better range on them, so would be a better idea in principle. They also have a more open IDE so it may be easier for people to cobble together a proper binding much easier than the original flic. There’s als a reason to get the hub with them as it also converts to infra red for control of telivisions, hifi and anything else that uses infra red technology.
Pluses of the Flic are it’s been around longer and I think I remember on the forum that someone was working on the bindings although I have no idea on whether they were complete. They may also be cheaper on Flic’s site while still available and may be available cheaply secondhand thereafter.
Just want other people’s thoughts on the choice between Flic and Flic 2. My instinct as far as the hub goes is not to get one as I feel like if something can be done without a hub and instead using openhab then that saves having a house cluttered up with 50 billion different hubs (One of the reasons I opted for LifX bulbs instead of Philips Hue)
The only draw to getting a hub would be getting the Flic 2 hub and using it for Infra-red. However my idea of building small wifi and IR enabled Arduino devices and seeing if I could bash together some protocols from more knowledgable people online (such as on here and on other home automation / arduino sites) would be more rewarding, more useful to the community and enable me to have more than one of the things for ideal IR placement (Esentially each IR “bridge” could be placed practically next to the device it controlled and powered from the mains via an adapter. No more iffy remotes!)
OK I’ve kind of wandered into another subject but… thoughts anyone? Do I opt for old Flic or go with Flic 2? Thinking in terms of likely Openhab Compatibility here…
So far, I think nobody uses the binding together with their hub. The binding works with fliclib-linux-hci which you just install on a Raspberry or any other linux device (on the same machine as openHAB or also remote).
I don’t know if their hub uses also fliclib-linux-hci. If yes, and if it’s possible to configure it exposing the port that flicd offers, it would also be possible to use the binding with the Hub. But I think nobody did have a look into that yet.
Thanks that’s good to know. Got some Christmas money so will be cobbling together the few IOT things we’ve got and adding some much needed extra automation. Flic could be handy for
that.
I am using the flic buttons and the HUB, sending http request via the REST api to virtual Openhab Items.
This worked well and I do not feel the strong need for a tighter integration, but the Flic team has just released an SDK for the Flic Hub. I guess this could make a Hub-based binding possible.
Ideally I would want to be able to just have a Pi as a 'hub for a variety of different devices including Flic and Flic2. Having a central computer (preferably something small, low power drainage and always-on like a Raspberry Pi) is far preferable than having to link together multiple ‘hubs’. It’s why I went with Lifx Bulbs over Philips Hue, for example.
In my opinion the best response to them providing the SDK would be to utilise any functionality to access the Flic 2 buttons as if using a hub but from Openhab itself, rather than adding a binding to then control a hub to then control a Flic 2. The only advantage of a Flic2 hub I can see is potentially increasing range, and I’m sure there are multiple other ways THAT could be done and Infra red, again I’m not sure how much control that would give and it may instead be worth ‘rolling your own’.
OK, well I recently got a starter kit including flic Hub LR, 15 Flic Buttons and 2 IR interfaces (Annoyingly , I didn’t realise that the IR interfaces required a direct physical connection to a hub so I am going to have to get another hub at some point). With the addition of being able to add commands for all my IR devices and the availability of an SDK, I think it would be a brilliant idea for someone to set up a binding for the new hub. With them also introducing the Flic twist (I’ve ordered 4 or 5 on IndieGoGo, can’t remember which) a hub binding makes even more sense as each new device will be added to the hub, hopefully meaning that the binding won’t have to change as much as if there was a completely new binding for each new device
