In the previous post on the matter, I described the setup of lighting solutions that we use in the current apartment, as well as the previous apartment, and my mother’s house. Today I want to get into a little bit more detail of how we manage to use all of these lights without relying solely on our phones, or on the voice controlled assistants.
First of all, yes, we do have both Google Assistant and Alexa at home. I only keep Assistant in the office because it’s easiest to disable the mic on it with the physical switch, but otherwise we like the convenience of asking Alexa for the weather, or let Google read Sarah Millican for us. To make things easier to integrate, we also signed up for Nabu Casa to integrate our Home Assistant automations with them.
While this works fairly decently for most default cases, sometimes you don’t want to talk, for instance because your partner is asleep or dozing off, and you still want to control the lights (or anything else) without talking. The phone (with the Home Assistant app) is a good option, but it is often inconvenient, particularly if you’re going around the flat with pocketless clothes.
As it turns out, one of the good things that smart lights and in general IoT home automation bring to the table, is the ability to add buttons, which usually do not need to be wired into anything, and that can be placed just about anywhere. These buttons also generally support more than one action connected to them (such as tap, double-tap, and hold), which should allow providing multiple controls at a single position more easily. But there are many options for buttons, and they are not generally compatible with each other, and I got myself confused for a long while.
So to save the day, Luke suggested me some time ago to look into Flic smart buttons, which were actually quite the godsend for us, particularly before we had a Home Assistant set up at all. The way these work is that they are Bluetooth LE devices, that can pair with a proprietary Bluetooth LR “hub” (or with your phone). The hub can either connect with a bunch of network services, or work with a variety of local network devices, as well as send arbitrary HTTP requests if you configure it to.
While Flics were our first foray into adding physical control to our home automation, I’m not entirely sure if I would recommend them now. While they are quite flexible at a first glance, they are less than stellar in a more complex environment. For instance, while the Flic Hub can talk directly to LIFX lights on local network (awesome, no Internet dependency), it doesn’t have as much control on the results of that: when we used the four LIFX spots in the previous flat’s office, local control was unusable, as nearly every other click would be missing one spot, making it nearly impossible to synchronise. Thankfully, LIFX is also available as a “Cloud” integration, that could handle the four lights just fine.
The Flic Hub can talk to a Hue Bridge as well, to toggle lights and select scenes, but this is still not as well integrated as an original Hue Smart Button: the latter can be configured to cycle between scenes on multiple taps, while I could only find ways to turn the light on or off, or to select one scene per action with the default Flic interface.
We also wanted to use Flic buttons to control some of the Home Assistant interactions. While buttons on the app are comfortable, and usually Google Assistant can understand when we say “to the bedroom”, there are other times when we could rather use a faster response than the full Google Assistant round-trip. Unfortunately this is an area where Flic leaves a lot to be desired.
First of all, the Flic Hub does not support IPv6 (surprise), which meant I can’t just point it at my Home Assistant hostname, I need to use the internal IPv4 address. Because of that, it also cannot validate the TLS certificate either. Second, Flic does not have an Home Assistant native integration: for both Hue and LIFX, you can configure the Hub against a Cloud account or the local bridge, then configure actions to act on the devices connected to them, but for Home Assistant there is nothing, so the options are limited to setting up manual HTTP requests.
This is where things get fairly annoying. You can either issue a bearer token to login to Home Assistant, in which case you can configure the Flic to execute a script directly, or you can use the webhook trigger to send the action to Home Assistant and handle it there. The former appears to be slightly more reliable in my experience, although I have not figured out if it’s the webhook request not being sent by the hook, or the fact that HA is taking time to execute the automations attached to it; I should spend more time debugging that, but I have not had the time. Using the Bearer Tokens is cumbersome, though. Part of the problem is that the token itself is an extremely long HTTP header, and while you can add custom headers to requests in the Flic app, the length of this header means you can’t copy it, or even remove it. If you need to replace the token you need to forget the integration with the HTTP request and create a new one altogether.
Now on the bright side, Flic has recently announced (by email, but not on their blog) that they launched a Software Development Kit that allows writing custom integrations with the Flic Hub. I have not looked deeply into it, because I have found other solutions that work for me to augment my current redundant Flics, but I would hope that it means we will have a better integration with Home Assistant one day in the future.
To explain what the better alternatives we’re using are, we need to point out the obvious one first: the native Hue smart buttons. As I said in the previous post, I did get them for my mother, so that the lights on the staircase turn on and off the same way as they did before I fixed the wiring. We considered getting them here, but it turns out that those buttons are not cheap. Indeed, the main difference between different buttons we have considered (or tried, or at are using) is to be found in the price. At the time of writing, the Hue buttons go for around £30, Flics for £20, Aqara (Xiaomi) buttons for around £8 and Ikea ones for £6 (allegedly).
So why not using cheaper options? Well, the problem is that all of these (on paper) require different bridges. Hue, Aqara and Ikea are all ZigBee based, but they don’t interoperate. They also have different specs and availability. The Aqara buttons can be easily ordered from AliExpress and they are significantly cheaper than the equivalent from Hue, but they are also bigger, and of a shape just strange enough to make it awkward to place next to the wallplates with the original switches of the apartment, unlike both Flic and Hue. The Ikea ones are the cheapest, but unless you have a chance to pop in their store, it seems like they won’t be shipping in much of a hurry. As I write this blog post, it’s been nearly three weeks that I ordered them and they still have not shipped, with the original estimate for delivery of just over a month — updated before even posting this: Ikea (UK) cancelled my order and the buttons are no longer available online, which meant I also didn’t get the new lights that I was waiting for. Will update if any new model becomes available. In the meantime I checked the instructions and it looks like these buttons only support a single tap action.
This is where things get more interesting thanks to Home Assistant. Electrolama sells a ZigBee stick that is compatible with Home Assistant and that can easily integrate with pretty much any ZigBee device, including the Philips Hue lights and the Aqara buttons. And even the Aqara supports tap, double-tap, and hold in the same fashion as Flic, but with a lot less delay and no lost event (again, in my experience). It turned out that at the end of the day for us the answer is to use cheaper buttons from AliExpress and configure those, rather than dealing with Flic, though at the moment we have not removed the Flics around the apartment at all, and we rather have decided to use them for slightly different purposes, for automation that can take a little bit more time to operate.
Indeed, the latency is the biggest problem of using Flic with Home Assistant right now: even when event is not going lost, it can sometimes take a few seconds before the event is fully processed, and in that time, you probably would have gotten annoyed enough that you would have asked a voice assistant, which sometimes causes the tap to be registered after the voice request, turning the light back off. Whereas, the Aqara button is pretty much instantaneous. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on there, it feels like the bridge is “asleep” and can’t send the request fast enough for Home Assistant to register it.
It is very likely that we would be replacing at least a couple of the Flics we already have set up with the Aqara buttons, when they arrive. They support the same tap/double-tap/hold patterns as the Flic, but are significantly lower latency. Although they are bigger, and they do seem to have very cheap brittle plastic, I nearly made it impossible to change the battery on my first one, because trying to open the compartment with a 20p coin completely flattened the back!
Once you have working triggers with ZigBee buttons, by the way, connecting more controls become definitely easier. I really would consider making a “ZigBee streamerdeck” to select the right inputs on the TV, to be honest. Right now we have one Flic to double-tap to turn on the Portal (useful in case one of our mothers is calling), and another one to select PS4 (tap), Switch (double-tap), or Kodi (hold).
Wiring automation, and selection of specific scenes, is the easiest thing you can do in Home Assistant, so you get a lot of power for a little investment in time, from my point of view. I’m really happy to have finally set it up just the way I want it. Although it’s now time to consider updating the setup to no longer assume that either of us is always at home at any time. You know, with events happening again, and the lockdown end in sight.
