Mobile Presence and iBeacon (discussion beginning 2015)

Apps & Clients
82

@sosaudio1 asked for the details of using IFTTT with IBeacons in another thread, so here they are. :sunglasses:

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 the receiving station app, which runs on a phone or a tablet.

OK, so the receiving station app knows that beacon 12345 is nearby. It also has some idea of how near it is, based solely on the signal strength of the message received.

So how do we integrate that with IFTTT?

The usual way is to use the IFTTT maker channel/service. In this case, the receiving station app receives the Beacon message from Beacon 12345. It has a rule which says that when it receives a message from that particular Beacon, it should do a HTTP post to the IFTTT maker channel. That becomes the “if” in the IFTTT applet.

OK, so now we are reaching IFTTT when the Beecon is detected. What should we use for the “that” in the applet?

Well, you can do anything you can do in the smartthings IFTTT service/channel. You could turn on a specific light. You could unlock a door. You could turn on A switch which then initiates a routine. You could flip the switch on a virtual presence sensor which also has switch capability.

This last is useful because it basically lets you turn detecting a Beacon into a SmartThings arrival sensor. And from then on you treat it like any other presence in SmartThings. You can turn it on when you come within range of the beacon and turn it off when you leave the range again.

But if you would rather just have Beacon detection trigger a specific SmartThings event, you could do that instead. Whatever works best for your use case.

And if you want to have multiple things happen at once, either use a routine or use Core ( ask in the core peer Assistance thread if you want to explore that option) or set up one IFTTT applet for each event, all triggered by the same maker service “if.”

So…

  1. set up a beacon Device using the transmission strength you want

  2. choose a receiving station app which can do webhooks (an HTTP post)

  3. create a rule in the receiving station app to send the HTTP post to your IFTTT accounts maker service/channel (see the IFTTT documentation on using the maker channel for more details)

  1. if you want, create a virtual presence sensor with switch capability
  1. create an IFTTT applet where the maker service receiving the post from your IBeacon receiving station app is the “if” and smartthings is the “that.”

So that’s the IFTTT method.

There are other alternatives. If you have android, you should be able to use a combination of Tasker and SharpTools. Or you can post directly to an end point in your smart things account if you know how to write Web services smart apps. Start at the top of this thread for more discussion. :sunglasses:

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