Flic

Flic is a lightweight but thread-safe Ruby implementation of the Fliclib. It interfaces with flicd, and allows Flic buttons to be used as an input for Ruby applications.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'flic'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install flic

The easiest way to get up an running is to use Flic::SimpleClient. It is a thin wrapper around Flic::Client that provides a simplified, synchronous API for the most intuative uses of a Flic button.

By default, flicd binds to localhost on port 5551. These are also the defaults for Filc::SimpleClient. This means that if you are running flicd on your local machine, establishing a connection is as easy as creating a new instance of Flic::SimpleClient. For other configurations, you can initialize Flic::SimpleCient with host and port. For example, Flic::SimpleClient.new('192.168.1.200', 5553) will open a connection to flicd on 192.168.1.200 listening on port 5553.

To get a list of verified buttons (buttons associated and ready to be used with a given flicd), call Flic::SimpleClient#buttons. This will return a list of button's bluetooth addresses.

A button must be in public mode before it can be added. To put a button in public mode, press and hold it for at least 7 seconds. Flic::SimpleClient#connect_button will return the bluetooh address of the button that was added or nil if no button was added.

Similarly, a button may be disconnected by passing Flic::SimpleClient#disconnect_button a button's bluetooth address.

Flic::SimpleClient#listen accepts a latency mode (:low, :normal, or :high) as it's first argument and button bluetooth addresses as its other arguments. For each event that occurs to those buttons, it yields the bluetooth address of the button responsible for a given event, the type of click involved in the event (:button_down, :button_up, :button_single_click, :button_double_click, or :button_hold), the time in seconds since the event occured, and whether the event was queued. It will block until the connection is closed or the block raises some other exception.

To gracefully cleanup all connection channels and close the socket connection, call Flic::SimpleClient#shutdown. Once a Flic::SimpleClient has been shutdown it will close the underlying socket and cannot be used anymore.

This is the script that I wrote to allow some of my Flic buttons to control Wink-enabled smart devices in home.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'bundler/setup'
require 'flic'
require 'httparty'

# These bluetooth addresses were obtained from SimpleClient#connect_button
COFFEE_TABLE_BUTTON  = 'XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX'
LIVING_ROOM_BUTTON   = 'XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX'
BEDROOM_BUTTON       = 'XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX'
NIGHTSTAND_BUTTON    = 'XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX'

# Obtained from https://winkbearertoken.appspot.com/
WINK_REQUEST_OPTIONS = {
    headers: {
        Authorization: 'Bearer XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
    }
}

# Get a list of all scenes
# HTTParty.get('https://api.wink.com/users/me/scenes', WINK_REQUEST_OPTIONS)
SCENES = {
    arriving:                     'XXXXXXX',
    leaving:                      'XXXXXXX',
    sleeping:                     'XXXXXXX',
    turn_on_living_room_lights:   'XXXXXXX',
    turn_off_living_room_lights:  'XXXXXXX',
    turn_on_bedroom_lights:       'XXXXXXX',
    turn_off_bedroom_lights:      'XXXXXXX',
    waking_up:                    'XXXXXXX'
}

ACTIONS = {
    COFFEE_TABLE_BUTTON => {
        button_single_click:  :turn_on_living_room_lights,
        button_double_click:  :turn_off_living_room_lights,
        button_hold:          :leaving
    },
    LIVING_ROOM_BUTTON => {
        button_single_click:  :turn_on_living_room_lights,
        button_double_click:  :turn_off_living_room_lights,
        button_hold:          :leaving
    },
    BEDROOM_BUTTON => {
        button_single_click:  :turn_on_bedroom_lights,
        button_double_click:  :turn_off_bedroom_lights,
        button_hold:          :sleeping
    },
    NIGHTSTAND_BUTTON => {
        button_single_click:  :turn_on_bedroom_lights,
        button_double_click:  :turn_off_bedroom_lights,
        button_hold:          :waking_up
    }
}

# Let's get this party started!
begin
  puts '[*] Opening a connection to flicd...'
  client = Flic::SimpleClient.new

  puts '[*] Entering main loop'
  client.listen(:low, COFFEE_TABLE_BUTTON, LIVING_ROOM_BUTTON, BEDROOM_BUTTON, NIGHTSTAND_BUTTON) do |button, event, latency|
    begin
      scene = SCENES[ACTIONS[button][event]]

      if scene && latency < 5
        puts "[*] [#{button}] Handling #{event}"

        HTTParty.post("https://api.wink.com/scenes/#{scene}/activate", WINK_REQUEST_OPTIONS)
      else
        puts "[*] [#{button}] Ignoring #{event}"
      end
    rescue StandardError => error
      puts "[!] Whoops! `#{error.inspect}` occured while processing #{event} on #{button}."
    end
  end
rescue StandardError => error
  puts "[!] Whoops! #{error.inspect} occured. Wait for a few seconds and restart everything."
  sleep 3

  retry
rescue Interrupt
  puts '[*] Shutting down gracefully because of an interrupt'

  client.shutdown
end

The interface of Flic::Client closely mirrors the official Java implimentation. Unlike Flic::SimpleClient, none of it's methods are blocking except Flic::Client#handle_next_event which blocks until the next event is recevied and dispatches it to the approprate handlers and Flic::Client#enter_main_loop which blocks until the client is shutdown and dispatches events as they are received. Ideally, Flic::Client#enter_main_loop should be run in a dedicated networking / event dispatch thread.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/anarchocurious/flic.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.