If You Live in a Smart Home You Need a Flic Button
If you’ve ever wanted to hit the button under the bedside table that turns off all your lights, locks the doors, and plays your favorite 12-hour playlist of box fan sounds so you can fall asleep, you should consider using the Flic button . It’s a $ 35 button that connects to your smartphone and lets you trigger unlimited automatic actions both online and in the real world.
How it works
Flic is a rubber button the size of a bottle cap that connects to your smartphone and Mac via Bluetooth and allows you to trigger actions customized with the included Flic app, which you can download from your device’s App Store. You can connect up to 10 buttons to your smartphone at the same time. It’s weather-resistant, has a sticky bottom, a snap-on attachment for you to wear, and an estimated 2-year battery life. Flick says this should, on average, last for a year before you need to replace the coin-cell battery.
By connecting a Mac or smartphone app to your services (such as Spotify, Strava, and Slack), smart home devices (such as your headlights or door locks), or IFTTT recipes (such as one that sends an automatic text message), you can turn one Flic button into three different buttons. It has three trigger options, each with a different trigger method. You can single-click, double-click, or hold to trigger each action (or set of actions). It’s better than yelling at the voice assistant across the room to turn off the lights.
When you customize the Flic button in your application, you can click the plus sign next to each click type to add new actions to the trigger. You can also drag and drop them to change the order of actions, as well as add new ones based on the categories of available and suggested uses of Flic.
Adding a service
Supported services include smart home appliances like WeMo, Philips Hue and IKEA Tradfri smart lights. You can also add your Chromecast, Gmail account, Slack account, or Strava profile, among others, allowing you to trigger actions like snoozing your work account for a day or telling your phone to start tracking your run and playing your favorite playlist to get you started. did not. You don’t have to fiddle with your phone when you walk out the door.
To add a service, click the triple dot icon in the upper right corner and select Suppliers. Select your account, grant access to your Flic profile, and there it is. Some services, like Philips Hue, do not give you full access to your smart lighting system (I was unable to set up the companion motion sensor with the Flic app), but you can still use it to tweak the lighting or set the scene.