I got a Whistle pet tracker for Christmas for our golden retriever. It is like a Fitbit or Jawbone for your pet. Pretty cool. The device communicates via bluetooth and wifi and syncs hourly with a phone. Using IFTTT it is possible to create some events, but I am wondering if it would be possible to use it for Geofencing so I know when the dog is away from home.
Anyone else playing with Whistle?
Hello. I’m wondering how you are getting on with your pet tracker. Thanks
It was an awful experience with the Whistle. The first one malfunctioned and they finally replaced it. It would not pair with my network and would not hold a charge.
Once I had a working one it was ok. Would have been better off using a Fitbit on the dog’s collar. The second one physically broke.
Customer service was terrible and told me that it is not warrantied because the dog broke it. Not the case, but they were unfriendly and unwilling to do anything about it.
I would avoid Whistle at all expenses and find a different pet tracker if you want one. Even when it was working the data was not very accurate.
Whistle acquired Tagg the Pet Tracker last year and now uses different hardware than their old round device. The Tagg-based hardware is rectangular and provides proactive push alerts based on GPS location, which the old Whistle didn’t do.
My brother has used Tagg trackers on his dogs for several years and has been really happy with them. He has one dog who is an escape artist so he has had to use it a lot. There’s no direct integration with SmartThings, but you could have it send a text to IFTTT and get indirect integration that way. But if all you want are notifications, you don’t need integration because it will text you directly. He had one tagg that was about five years old when the company was bought by whistle and that was on a dog who spent a lot of time outdoors, so I think the durability has been good.
So the good news is that it appears whistle has significantly improved both it’s hardware and features since 2014. But there still no direct integration with SmartThings.
Has anyone made any headway on this? The new Whistle 3 is an awesome pet tracker. I’d love to be able to use this for ST presence for my dog.
I got one for Christmas and was wondering the same thing. If they have an open api it should be easy to make a device driver.
I don’t think it is openly published, but some people have made headway on discovering some API calls. I haven’t had any time to dig in yet my self.
My brother Has used TAGG/whistle on his dog for years. He really likes it.
You now have the option to have it send email notifications to any email you like, so you can get IFTTT integration that way. It may be a little bit slow, so it’s not as good as the notification you already get on your phone/smart watch, but it might be helpful for some people.
Thanks for this. Exactly what I need to add this to my SmartThings setup.
The emailtrigger trick that @JDRoberts suggested is cool too but I think I would prefer to send the email to Stringify - but same idea.
Let me know if you write a device handler. I’d love to test.
Another modern success at pulling Whistle info into HomeAssistant:
Does anyone have the experience to port this Python to a Pi and and update ST through a custom app or CoRE webhooks for pet presence, or even directly from a custom smart app since it looks just to be a REST api?.. I’d even be willing to chip in beer money.
I’m not even sure the email trick works. You cannot add a hashtag, you cannot specify from where the email comes, and you have to subject yourself to annoying emails to get any ifttt functionality regarding presence. I bought the whistle based on these comments and I’m pissed off about it.
Both IFTTT and Whistle have changed options a number of times, and it’s hard to keep up with what’s possible. 
I just checked with my brother, and he said that the Gmail IFTTT service has a lot more options than the regular email one. So if you create a Gmail address for your dog, which is what he did, that one can recognize that it received an email from a specific party and you can trigger off of that:
But he also said since he got an Apple Watch he’s not using the IFTTT channel anymore, he just gets the notifications on the watch. So check for yourself and make sure you can set up what you want.
I already knew it sounded like I was blaming you, and I’m not. I already figured I would have to create a new gmail I do not have on my phone. It is still irritating that the one and only useful feature whistle could offer through ifttt is not an option. How absolutely ridiculous.
Agreed. It does seem like an odd omission. 
I have another thread over here looking for a developer to help translate an existing python (Home Assistant) implementation to a ST SmartApp. Pile on.
Yeah, I saw that thread. I would be willing to add my own money to that, even though at this point I purchased my own raspberry pi to attempt all the wonderful controls available to people who are limited by smartthings.
That was my second thought. Run the python already written on my Pi and tie it to a webCoRE webhook. My programming skills are extremely limited though, and with such a simple API, the amount of time it would take me to figure out the above I could probably figure it out in grovvy too. I’ve started looking at the Life360 SmartApp code as something to reverse engineer and convert to talk up to the Whistle cloud.
I am equally lacking in skill in that arena, and it sounds like we’re pretty much in the same boat. I have a pile of tech projects to look at, and instead of focusing on one, give a few minutes here and there to each. When I finally get a chance to sit down with this I’ll go through it as well and perhaps we can compare notes, since apparently no one with the know how sees the need.
I also found another integration written for node with is also java based and much similar to groovy.
Going to try to dive in a get something going in the next few weeks, but again my programming skills are severely lacking.
