Physical Controls for the Digital Dash , Part 2

Well, it took a bit longer than I expected (about six months longer) but I finally got my Flic Bluetooth buttons.  And I like them; see my full review here: 
http://mikesgeneralblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/flic-bluetooth-button-review.html

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with all of them (I have five), but I have added one on the right-hand side of the center console in the Z3 as a music control.

I also thought about mirroring its functions to another button on the back of the steering wheel, but I've found that the car's cabin is small enough that I can reach the button while driving without even shifting position, so I've dropped that idea for the moment.

Here are the functions the button performs.

When the main screen is showing:

Short Click - Next (random) track when PowerAmp is the music source.  When Pandora is playing instead, Skip the current track.

Double Click - Replay the Previous Track (PowerAmp only; no function for Pandora).

Long Click - Display the Favorite Songs menu with a cursor used to highlight selections.

Triple Click - Toggles pause for the currently playing track.

When the Favorite Songs Menu is showing:

Short Click - Cause the music cursor to step down the list to the next entry.  If the bottom of the list is reached, the cursor wraps around back to the top of the list.

Long Click - Select the song under the cursor and have PowerAmp begin playing the track. This causes PowerAmp to display the album art for the song.  After about 5 seconds, the system returns to the main Digital Dash screen automatically.

Double Click - Cancels the Favorite Song menu and removes it from the screen without selecting any track.


If you read the first part of the physical controls documentation, you might recognize those functions as also being performed by the Bluetooth Gamepad that I've re-purposed into a sidearm controller.

In fact, I just reused the same code I wrote for that.  In order to make the Flic perform those functions, all I had to do was create the profiles that caught the various activations.  Once I had done that, I just linked to the existing tasks.  I don't think that it took me 10 minutes to get everything working.

We've taken a few drives and tried out the Flic and it has worked beautifully.  It's much easier (and safer) to click the button than it is to try hit the on-screen controls.