BeaconThings - Beacons and SmartThings

[JDRoberts]

@sosaudio1

Ok, so let’s say… to build this out… I have a beacon in my garage, I want to drive up to my house and have a Z Wave garage door opener open my garage door only when I am pulling into the driveway… Say… At the curb, sidewalk. I have my phone on me. What communication interaction needs to happen to trigger SmartThings to fire? IFTTT is available now on android. Is there a way to have a beacon manager do something that IFTTT is waiting for for it to talk to the smart things hub? Geofencing works by getting near or away from the house. What do we need to tell the beacon when we are close to make it run the command to open the door?

Rather than taking this thread too far off topic, i’ve put a reply in the General Beacon thread :

Mobile Presence and iBeacon (discussion beginning 2015)

@sosaudio1 asked for the details of using IFTTT with IBeacons in another thread, so here they are. Beacons don’t run any commands. All the beacon device does every few seconds is send out its own ID. So basically it’s just saying “I am here. I am here. I am here.” Now you have to have a receiving station app on a phone/tablet that will receive that message. Once it gets the message, it’s up to the receiving station app to decide what to do next, based on the ID of the Beacon sending the message. The usual metaphor for this is a lighthouse. The beacon is the lighthouse, sending out its light. It has no idea if there any ships nearby or not. It just keeps sending the same light over and over. It is up to each ship to decide what to do when it sees the light. The ship is …

Followups not specifically about the Beaconthings app should go in the general beacon thread.