Widen Your Comfort Zone with Integrations on IFTTT
Connecting the people and their devices around them is the old news now.
Integration of the data from different sources is the next complexity, even before facing the processing of all data being transferred/transformed.
Human-Computer Interaction bases the foundation for our acknowledged necessities. A button to command for our digital sources, creating custom notification systems with their value-added forms. Our lives become pervasive just like our devices, with benefits of mobility and data-driven applications that are expected to adjust themselves with a context within user’s behavioral actions.
IFTTT [ If This Than That ] is one of the latest integration tool-kits in these days.
It has shown that moving information and integrating the favorite service providers through the web is not that hard. Just enable a service, authorize yourself, and pick an applet that suits your taste.
The platform is capable of creating applets; which are configured with pre-defined platforms like famous ones (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and very good ones, extending their capabilities to the Internet of Things space.
Such actions are defined within a small program called applet, customizable on mobile and web. Among those actions, platforms allow you to get notified of their services if something has happened.
– triggering actions upon actions; hence a reactive declaration. It is pretty much creating a generic server that listens for a platform’s service run. Then it generates action on that state.
If [trigger] then [action]
For instance,
– If it rains 12 hours from now, send me a notification (can warn for watering or harvesting times, or your umbrella’s alarm.)
– If I am entering a zone (by geo-fencing), run the car engine,
– If I am leaving a zone, order a pizza (some of us should tell food ordering sites eg. yemeksepeti.com)
– Trigger a reboot or shutdown on a remote server, by sending an SMS to Twilio.
by hardware deployment and sensors integration ;
– If my house kit hears a crying baby, give me a notification – so I can check with the baby keeper,
– If no one is at home, (geo-fencing, again) turn on/off TV, make internet usage and play with the lighting, randomly. (Security)
– A classic one, get my coffee ready at 8 tomorrow
How do we build custom scripts and make them run with commercial services that we authorize ourselves, on IFTTT?
It used to be free, and anyone willing to develop applets and custom notifications could easily get an API for that.
As is, users can get applets and make modifications on them, authorize themselves on connected platforms, and receive notifications with pre-defined recipes.
Now a maker needs to contact the site for getting an API Key to create a “Maker Channel” with it. Check webhooks
What do we want it to do for us?
It should be a backend service that does 3 simple operations.
1- Make a request to a website,
2- Fetch the data and maybe process it to another form,
3 – Send the data to the “Maker Channel”.
An example of this kind of scripting in Python can be found here.
Another example of an IFTTT agent is demonstrated by QNAP here, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) provider.
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