The Alexa Dimmer Is FINALLY Here | Flic Twist Review

More home assistant for dummies please!

With the twist motion, why have the points do the action? Why not just have the twisting motion send a "twist left" or "twist right" action? That way you can have the brightness/change happen in percentages and act like a real dimmer.. instead of 12 discreet points.

Very interesting product. Been waiting for it for ages. Do you know if you can choose the different Spotify playlist and have them play through Sonos speakers? That would be my main use, but I can't find any info on this😅😅 Thanks from Copenhagen!

Mine eventually arrived with an import duty bill of £54 from DHL.

Loving the videos, keep them coming. By the way where did you get those perfect sized stickers for the flic twist.

Thanks. Tempt us with a really useful button, only to find it's not available in the UK 😟

Thanks for showing us practically every single little thing that can be done with the flic, because there's literally nothing else that it can do. it's pretty much garbage.

Clickbait titles might get you more revenue but they damage your credibility. As does every sponsored video where you claim whateverproducttheyaregivingyoumoneytopromote is going such a game changer and nothing will be the same (until the next video paid video). Haven't you already ditched Alexa and Home Assistant already for HomeKit and AQARA?

Dorks and Virgins!?!? and "I can see his virginity growing back, he is one of us, one of us, one of us". Really? You are a dork and a nerd, big deal, just embrace it, why do you continue to be in denial and have to always be such a twunt when you speak about Home Assistant, the people who create it and the community that help you get all your silly automations setup and working. Implying that you are better than them because "look behind me, at my sweet sweet room filled with Star Wars posters, superhero toys, vintage gaming tech and Back to the Future Nikes. Would a dork have such treasures all around him? No, only a cool person.... MUUUUMMM, TELL THEM I'M COOOOOOLLLL".

Your videos are funny and informative. Keep them videos coming.

I have a big plex server better then paying for other streaming providers lol

Nice product I guess but I just want to say commands I don’t want to faff about twisting and pushing buttons …

All the tutorials all the time

Presumably you need a Flic hub to utilise the Twist to its fullest extent?

The walking fast sequence is the greatest cinematography achievement since the tracking shot in Citizen Kane xxx

Hahahaha the walking joke was priceless you always know how to get a good laugh I love it!

Great review Paul, just a note to pass on. I order from Flic in July 23 and after recieving my order I then recieve an import tax invoice from FedEx. After contacting Flic I was told that because of Brexit we have to pay import taxes - I will add that as I stated to Flic this was not made clear to me a point of ordering they did refund the FexEx invoice to me

Hmmm.... pretty awesome looking device, however ... is another elephant in the room the fact that on their site it says a Flic hub is required. Is this really as proprietary as it sounds ?? or will it work with other hubs and gateways ??

Do you need the flic hub?

I’d love to see a HOME ASSISTANT tutorial

I’ve got one , haven’t run boxed it yet . Can You remap the media selections

Why do you pretend the TV remote doesn’t exist. 😢

I have one of these set up with hue dimming on the dial, and double pressing will turn off all the lights instead of having to scroll the dial back down to zero. The issue if if you then accidentally jog the dial in the middle of the night (and it is extremely sensitive), it remembers you were at 100% and boom, blinded.

This is just one of the issues we had that lead my other half to rage and ban these things. So beware, nice looking hardware, poor implementation.

I would urge anyone to AVOID Flic.

Waited years for the flic twists to be delivered, with multiple delays "to get the feel right".
What Flic delivered with these delays was a cheap feeling device, with awkward HA integrations and a couple of my devices producing ghost presses - meaning regularly these will turn on my lights only to immediately turn them off, this happens for both the button and dial actions.


Its not as interesting - but I wish I could refund my Flic's and replace them with Hue Dial switches.
They're cheaper, connect directly to HA and have almost as many separate actions with the 4 buttons and dial. The only thing they lack is the light feedback, which tbh is gimmicky for most actions, as with volume/brightness I'm looking/listening to the device itself for the correct level rather than the Dial.

just wish they'd launched with a working sdk and matter support. mine are currently being used as bricks

I haven't looked into the specs of this. If it has Bluetooth, you could use ESpresense and then using HomeAssistant you could have it room specific. I.e. depending which room the flic is in could have a different set of HA automations attached.

How is this better than voice control?

Yes do more how to on the flic twist! Does it HomeKit?

I think this is brilliant. I like the ease of use with Amazon Alexa

2'40" "Now I pick up my remote" urghhhh? My TV has a remote control which has a youtibe button, netflix button, prime button, disney button and 0-9 programmable shortcut buttons, even has play, pause etc etc - its from 2017, its IR, Bluetooth and RF - -it cam with the TV - so whats so speical about this twist knob thing? Don get it I'm afraid

Tutorial please...

I am also stoked with my flic twists purchase. I have lifx in my house (I'm Australian, and haven't had the issues that many have had with them) and it works seamlessly. I had chosen the scene blender, but wasn't aware that the selector function wasn't available on the standard twist function. I have one twist for 2 spaces (lounge and kitchen) and was thinking of resetting it to put it in that selector mode, but thanks to your video, I won't bother to do that now. I was disappointed that I couldn't use the twist for volume control on my analogue speakers via the ir blaster, but now that I have the twists, it frees up my flic 2 buttons, so I can use them with the blaster and have a button for up and one for down instead. I've been inching towards getting home assistant anyway, so I think this is the push to do exactly that to add extra functionality. 🤘🏼 Cheers

I'm using Google nest hub max to control all my smart home devices 😁

Great fun. Ohhhh the possibilities!!! Thanks for sharing the find.

You nearly have an equal amount of Sean's and Steven's in your patreon list at the end! 😁🤓

Hi Paul, a few things you seemed to miss out (assuming I didn’t miss you mentioning them).

1. Those stickers are home made and do not come with the device. They sell some pretty poor stickers for an additional cost (what did you use to create yours?).

2. You need a hub with these and there are two hubs, the mini hub and the LR hub. The LR hub is more expensive but better suited to those who really like to dabble with complex smart home set ups. However, the reason I got the LR hub is that it allows the plugging in of an IR blaster, which means you can control TV volume or anything IR (cheap Christmas lights with remote controls all made smart with a bit of programming in the app and learning of the IR signals). I think there is possibly some Bluetooth only functionality that uses your phone instead of a hub, but that is limited and might not work with the twist the way you are showing. It also means they will only work when in range of the phone they are set up with.

3. This is the biggest of your omissions. When setting up multiple selection points on the dial, 12 o clock is the default and always defaults back to that function after 10 seconds. So let’s say you’ve set up 3 o’clock to control Spotify and 12 o’clock is to turn your lights on and off. When you turn to the Spotify function and press the button to play and then three minutes later you want to pause as you showed in your video with your pause button, the Twist will have defaulted back to the lights and pressing the button will turn your lights off or on and will not control Spotify anymore until you turn the dial back to 3 o’clock and press the button.

I was a backer on Kickstarter and we told them this last point was a no go to be the only functioning option. I can understand why they have done it, but you should have the option to retain the Twist at its last used function or to default back to 12 o’clock as setting and not forced upon us. Shortcut Labs have told us lots of lies throughout the kickstarter and hidden many of the ways it wouldn’t function quite as advertised. They have also said they are focused purely on adding matter support (which was said to be part of the feature set two years ago when pitched and still does not come out of the box and is still not present). So I’d take anything Shortcut Labs say about adding features or fixing issues with a pinch of salt as they do not fulfil their promises and their communications team is appalling. Maybe you can use some of your influence to actually help us backers out and feed this back to Shortcut Labs as they are not interested in user feedback from actual consumers.

Do you have to have the FLIC hub as well? Because it seems like every smart home device you have to have a hub 🤦🏻‍♂️ will the FLIC twist work standalone with HA ?

Home assistant 😅.
He is one of us.
Lol man the button 🔘 is cool.

I want this tutorial, and special or the FireTV stick (its the cheapest option for SmartTV and most widespread)

Really happy to see that you are giving the issue with random tracks on spotify playlists some awareness. :D
I have been trying to do this for a long time and I have been asking about it in the flic community ever since I got my first flic 2 button in the beginning og 2021. :o

Hope the guys from flic sees your video. :-)

Hi Paul great coverage and happy to see an alternative perspective on the flic twists, I personally and a SmartThings user so if possible it would be ideal to see how one could make the most of it via that method as personally I wont go near Alex, and have yet to dive into HA. It is curious though as I have been able to set up manual routines via ST and assign those to the Flic Twist with (so far) not much issues. I am trying to future proof via ways of buying Matter devices primarily so obviously the Matter update should open this device right up but I do like the idea of being able to harness the likes of a projector or other media devices and get impressive automations to trigger from a flic twist.

So an in depth tutorial would be highly helpful and I think if you can cover of as many platforms users might have would be great, might be worth doing one to follow up after the release of the matter video too.

Keep up the work, your one of the staples for helping my journey to grow a smart home.

Thank you for the good Video. Please do a tutorial video

I backed this and overall it’s left a sour taste. HomeKit support isn’t there. Software is pretty poor. And it’s incredibly late.

I’m hoping they sort it soon as I really wanted to like this but at the moment they’re sat in their boxes untouched until the software actually matches what they promised.