Wednesday, January 04, 2017

If This Then That

Pippa (Icons passim) found a flat and moved out just before Christmas. I find it astonishing that she was with me for nearly two months. It seems like no time at all.

It has, however, freed me to start messing about with If This Then That, and particularly its integration with my Hive heating system. I could hardly have it switching on and off based on my whereabouts when there might be someone else in the house.

The idea behind IFTTT is simple. It is a web-based service that allows me to create chains of simple conditional statements, called "applets", which are triggered based on changes to other web services.

The day before yesterday I created an applet used Android Location automatically to set the thermostat to schedule whenever I arrived at or near home. It didn't seem to fire at first, but it worked a charm yesterday.

Last night, I created an applet to set the temperature to 7 centigrade (enough to stop the place freezing up) whenever I left. That didn't kick in until lunch time even though I was at work before nine. With any luck it will bed in like Monday's effort.

No comments: