HomeKit - First Look
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Hi @Emil, you seem pretty active here so thought I'd ping you!
Just upgraded my firmware and have setup HomeKit. Couple quick questions.IKEA Tradfri
Flic natively supports ikea lights which is really cool, especially the toggle function. However when I switched my Flic button to HomeKit, I noticed that I can't toggle an ikea light, only set it to on or off.. If this is simply a HomeKit limitation, I will understand. Do you know of a workaround?Chaining Commands
When a flic button has HomeKit switched on, it seems command chaining is disabled. Why is this? Why could the button not co-exist.. Why couldn't it handle HomeKit actions via the HomeKit app (as it currently does), and then Flic actions, chained after the HomeKit action, via the Flic App?Kind Regards,
Marley -
@Emil Yessss!!!
That video is exactly what I needed. It works and gives me exactly what I wanted.
Conditional shortcut scripting is perfect for me. I don't even have to use scenes as I can test accessories directly and react with controlling accessories directly.
Thank you!
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@derek-erb The concept of "toggle" is something that we have implemented on most of our actions on the Flic Hub, however, the Apple HomeKit ecosystem doesn't really have this feature. We can not send "toggle events" to HomeKit. We only send press events to apple and then it is they who decide what to execute.
That said, there are ways to work around this if you are willing to spend some time on it. For example, you can have a look at this video:
If you think Apple should have a more smooth approach for this, please reach out to them and tell them this. The more people who gives them feedback, the higher probability is that they'll do something about it.
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I'm actually fine with the Flic being 100% HomeKit-controlled or 100% Flic-controlled.
I'm even fine with assigning a scene per click, even though that makes for a lot of scenes.
My problem is creating a scene which can toggle on/off rather than just on or off. I would be happy with a single click toggling a scene on/off or toggling HK devices on/off. But I can't see to be able to get it to do that. At the moment I have a single-click turning HK devices on, a double-click turning HK devices off and a long click doing something else to those same devices (dimming, colours, ...) so that they are still turned off by the double-click. But I am obviously losing options here as I now only have 1 or 2 possible command options as I always have to reserve the 3rd one for turning things off.
Is there some way to configure the Flic or the HK scene to actually toggle HK scenes or HK devices rather than only setting a single HK scene or a single set of HK devices to a particular state?
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I think the previous answer answers the questions correctly.
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@hello_marley
As I've been playing around with these I'm sorry to have to tell you that the limitations that you've identified lie with Apple.The first is a Homekit limitation. Homekit will only set 'scenes' of a light being on or off. In order to have flic toggle a light you have to assign the flic to start a homekit shortcut that gets the state of the light and then changes it to the opposite light. If you've a homekit hub (iPad, Homepod or AppleTV) then these shortcuts will run on those devices, so you dont' need the phone to be on. It's pretty simple but an annoying HomeKit limitation.
The second limitation, that a flic assigned to Homekit cannot be used for anything else, was Apple's requirement to get HomeKit approval. It's easy to implement what you want but Apple thought "it'd be easier' if the buttons just did one thing, their thing. Totally counterintuitive for a device that's designed to run routines but flic labs just had to comply. I agree that's the one thing I really want as it'd allow flic hub to 'glue together' HomeKit and non-Homekit control.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
