Flic Twist with Sonos

oof · 10 Oct 2024, 22:04

My setup is that I have a Flic Twist associated with Flic LR Hub. The goal is to be able to play Sonos internet radio stations (note: not “Playlists,” which are much more natively supported) and to change the volume with the twist dial.

The challenge is that the native IOS/Flic app does volume-to-Sonos correctly (via the twist dial), but can’t trigger stations. IFTTT is way too laggy/slow for real time music, so I ruled that out after I got it “working.” HA can trigger stations and set fixed volume, but volume adjustments from the dial are an issue. So, in the immortal words of the internet: “Why Not Both?”
--> Volume happens via the flic app
--> Station selection happens via a webhook to Home Assistant

Also, the Twist has a single and a double click, so I want to play two different radio stations (local NPR + Sirius XM) which is a whole additional problem.

CURRENT VERSIONS
Flic Hubs LR = v4.3.5
Filc Twist = v2
Sonos S1 = v11.14
HA Core = 2024.10.1
HA Supervisor = 2024.10.0
HA Operating System = 13.1

Here’s how to do it:

Set up your Flic Twist & Hub + Sonos & configure the twist to do volume on the kitchen, via the Flic IOS app
Then, in Home Assistant, set up an automation (yaml below) to trigger the radio playlist (trick is the x-rincon-mp3radio prefix before the http URL) note that there need to be two separate actions in the automation if you want to set the volume and play a thing) - I wanted a consistent, set volume for this particular source.
Still in HA, set up a webhook trigger to call that automation. It’s notable that the creation of the webhook creates a single-factor “secret” in the name of the webhook, flic-button-pressed-<redacted> which becomes the URI.
Test the automation with curl on your laptop, to make sure that part is set up. This should cause the music to start.

curl -X POST http://homeassistant.local:8123/api/webhook/flic-button-pressed-<redacted>

Then, in the Flic IOS App, configure the flic button push trigger a URL hit to HA with the “http internet request” action, and paste in your HA webhook link.
Repeat the whole process for flic double-click, with a second automation

There’s a GOTCHA on the media_content_id and URL prefixing. For starters, media_content_type: music should JFW. Don’t worry about that part. But for the streaming station, you’ll need that x-rincon-mp3radio prefix. There’s a nice little doc about how to extract the Sirius XM specific station URL here, but do use the x-rincon-mp3radio prefix again, and not the x-sonosapi-hls-static approach.

alias: Flic Button Pressed
description: ""
triggers:
  - trigger: webhook
    allowed_methods:
      - POST
      - PUT
    local_only: true
    webhook_id: flic-button-pressed-<redacted>
actions:
  - action: media_player.volume_set
    data:
      volume_level: 0.3
    target:
      area_id: kitchen
      device_id: 59dd4ccdec3d2qq42408305b8c9c3fa7
      entity_id: media_player.sonos_room_name
  - action: media_player.play_media
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.sonos_room_name
      area_id: kitchen
      device_id: 59dd4ccdec3d2qq42408305b8c9c3fa7
    data:
      media_content_type: music
      media_content_id: ""x-rincon-mp3radio://https://live-ftc-prod-device.streaming.siriusxm.com/v1/763a312c707<redacted>_v4.m3u8