Connecting to Services with IFTTT

The Particle Cloud is great for ‘rolling your own’ IoT API’s, but there’s hundreds if not thousands of things that don’t involve Particle that we might want to be able to connect to. We might want to:

  • Send an email from our board
  • Deliver a push notification to your mobile device
  • Send a tweet to our followers
  • Post to Slack
  • Send a SMS to a friend
  • Look up or respond to changes in the weather
  • Monitor a variable and store it to Google Drive
  • Do something when your phone take a new photo
  • Interact with other consumer products like set the temperature on your Nest thermostat, change the color of your Hue Lightbulbs or get alerted when someone activates one of your Belkin Smart Sockets.
  • and the list goes on…
IFTTT Homepage

IFTTT Homepage

Enter IFTTT - If This, then That.

This is exactly what IFTTT or IF THIS THEN THAT let’s us do. It’s figured out the hard parts of working with online services, other products and other people’s APIs. It makes them easy to connect to through quick ‘recipes’ which do this when that happens. You set what your trigger is (a variable on your board changes to something new or your thermostat changes temperature) and then it takes action (sends an email, shares a link, etc.).

Just set up an account and then create your first recipe. Once you’ve done that… point it at your Particle using the Webhooks integration. We’ll cover that in the next guide: Connecting IFTTT and Particle Functions

Trigger + Action = Recipe

By using the Webhooks integration on IFTTT you get lots of ways to interact with your board. These are:

Triggers:

  • New event published - trigger an IFTTT action when you publish an event from your board
  • Monitor a variable - fires when a value on your Particle device changes to something interesting.

Actions:

  • Publish an event - publishes an event back to your device(s), which you can catch with Particle.subscribe.
  • Call a function - calls a function on one of your Devices, triggering an action in the physical world.

Online resources

Example Recipes for the IOT

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