Flic Hub LR and Home Assistant

[stevehooper]

I have Home Assistant running on my Raspberry Pi 4B as the OS (not docker).

Directly underneath my RPi4 is my Flic Hub LR. Both are connected to my router via Ethernet.

Given that Home Assistant is so popular I, foolishly, believed it would be straightforward to connect the two via the Home Assistant Integrations... it isn't!

Home Assistant is asking for a "pairing code". Flic support in this forum is saying that the code is not available.

I don't have a HomePod and don't want to spend £100 on buying one, though I am an Apple user (phone, tablet, and Macbook).

Surely, there must be a simple way to be able to use my Flic Hub LR within Home Assistant... But how?

[Emil]

@rickard Yes! This will be possible, but note that we have not yet started to ship Flic Duo. We still need to finalize the Hub SDK events for the Duo so I can't give you an example right now. For MQTT itself, please see https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/flic-hub-sdk-mqtt-js.

[rickard]

@Emil I have just ordered a bunch of flic duo with hub.

I am new to both home assistant and flic platform but I do want home assistant in between to have better support for everything I want to do.

What I want is a simple mqtt implementation that can send over which controller is triggering, which gesture and which amount.

Is all of this possible?
Can you post instructions on how to make this happen?

I am guessing I want a message similar to this

publishMqtt("flic/button", {
buttonId: "button1",
gesture: "twist",
value: 47
});

[Emil]

@craig-2 we are internally experimenting with our new hub sdk features (https://community.flic.io/topic/18536/new-flic-twist-features-for-the-hub-sdk) together with home assistant (communicating over mqtt) and it works pretty good. So that is one option.

The other option is to expose devices in home assistant as matter devices, as explained here https://community.flic.io/topic/18457/home-assistant-twist-another-angle.

[craig 2]

@da-konold @Emil I am also curious if there are any updates. It appears there is a matter bridge implemented for Home Assistant, but I have no clue how I would go about using it. I currently have three flic-twists and two fic buttons and am transitioning away from Alexa to Home Assistant.

[da.konold]

@Emil are there any updates regarding Matter or even better HA integrations?

[da.konold]

@da-konold right in the second I sent this, I received an email with the latest news

• The Hub will be a matter controller as soon as the software is finished
• Twist support for the SDK will be released as soon as finished
• HA integration, maybe after Matter is finished

[da.konold]

Do we have any updates here? Right now we don't have the promised Matter nor the Homeassistant integration... That is really smth. why people would choose to not use Flic Buttons but something else... even the buttons are awesome.

[flic r]

Hi Steve and Johan,

do you know of this site?
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/flic-hub-sdk-web-hook-step-by-step/390655

I successfully use this very simple approach with a matching automation
on Home Assistant.

Good luck!
Joachim

PS: Missing SDK support on the hub mini annoys me, just as the lack of Twist support in the SDK as of now. I wonder why the latter one is not just there - seems so straight forward to an outsider like me.

[johan.nanzen]

I have made a lot of updates to the Home Assistant integration. Here's some screenshots showing the entities it will add. Each button and the Hub will act as a separate devices. The click type is an attribute on a binary sensor on a button.

These entities will help you setup automations based on click type and also keep track of when it's time to change the battery, for example.

Once the js-script is added and started on the Hub and the integration is added in HomeAssistant, the Hub will automatically be discovered in Home Assistant and the buttons will be added.

@chris-3 Unfortunately I do not own a FlicTwist so I'm not able to add support for it. Maybe @Emil is able to help out here?

I wish there was a websocket or something similar already built into the Hub, that would make the integration a lot easier to add from a user perspective, at least until Matter support is released.

[Emil]

@chris-3 Our current number one priority is support for Matter. Assuming Home Assistant implements Matter bridge, that should mean the Twist will be able to control devices in Home Assistant through Matter.

[chris 3]

@Emil 9 months later and still nothing to get this working easier in Home Assistant. I have just received the twists yesterday and now realise that this is completely unless having any flic products as it has three interrogations.

An easy win for Flic is integration as massive amount of your market is using this and also works around other integrations. Crazy this is not your no.1 Priority

Posted my excitement for getting the twist online, and now replying not to buy it because of poor integration...

Why has Flic committed commercial suicide? you had three years to write the code for HA.

[fictionbrain]

@johan-nanzen Thank you very much for this! I tried a couple of "Manual" integrations, but couldn't get them to work. Now I've got two buttons working with each two actions (one quick-click, and one where I hold the button down for two seconds).

I look forward to seeing it develop!

[mikie9000]

@Emil i would definitely agree that a direct home assistant integration would be good. Or at the very least a way to understand how to get the flics to work. is there any resource available to get Flic's to work in home assistant

[jason 0]

@Emil Hi Guys,

I thought that the new Flic Twist touted Home Assistant integration?

Or was that my eyes playing tricks on me ?

All the best

Jason

[alex 1]

I second that, I just bought a hub and buttons and didnt realise that there is no easy integration with flic hub and HA. My fault, but disappointing.

[johan.nanzen]

I started to make an Home Assistant Integration a while ago. You can find it here: https://github.com/JohNan/home-assistant-flichub

I never completed it completely but I think it should work partially at least.

It uses a TCP connection for communication that has to be setup on the Flic Hub. A linked repo is available in the above repo.

I also just noticed that Flic have released a MQTT client which should make it a lot easier to create an HA Integration. I might give it a shot to convert this one to using MQTT instead.

[Emil]

@stevehooper yeah we should really try to add a direct Home Assistant integration from the Flic hub someday, since it is so popular...

In the meantime, can you use the Internet Request action in our app to send a simple http request to your device running Home Assistant maybe?