How to trigger a virtual sensor using the IFTTT maker channel

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Hi guys,

I wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of “virtual sensor” that can be triggered using the IFTTT maker channel. This would give us endless possibilities as it opens up the whole world of IFTTT (currently over 300 channels!) to be used with pimatic!

Any ideas / experiences how to make this work?

@GuybrushMR80

I have Experiment with IFTTT and you can integrate this in Pimatic see here:

Thanks but I believe your use case is the other way round - you want to SEND something to the IFTTT maker channel while I’m looking for a solution to RECEIVE something from the IFTTT maker channel. In other words: you want to trigger an IFTTT event whenever the light turns on, I want to turn on the light whenever an IFTTT event is triggered…

Can IFTTT contact some API url?

@koffienl Yes, looks like: https://ifttt.com/maker - you can use “Triggers” or “Actions”. Triggers will allow you to receive web requests, great for triggering events in devices / services that are natively supporting IFTTT but not pimatic. And Actions have even more potential: You can call any URL with post, get, delete and include a body - so if you open pimatic to be accessible from outside you would with one solution have hundreds of “virtual sensors” accessible. Things that currently require a special plugin for pimatic would instantly work to create rules using the channels available at IFTTT.

But if you can let IFTTT connect to a URL, you can let it speak to pimatic over the API?

@koffienl said in How to trigger a virtual sensor using the IFTTT maker channel:

But if you can let IFTTT connect to a URL, you can let it speak to pimatic over the API?

No. From a Maker Channel you can only create actions on a publically available web service endpoint. Pimatic can push event to the channel but it can’t pull from the channel. A possible solution would be to design a service relay with a pull and push interface and to set this up in the cloud.

Sorry, I don’t get that. If I setup my raspberry with some dyndns I have a publicly available website, right? the Pimatic GUI is pwd protected - how does this work with the API?

https://pimatic.org/api/actions/

@koffienl OK so it should work I guess, will give it a try.
@mwittig can you explain why you think it won’t work? Or is it just not advisable due to security concerns?

@GuybrushMR80 Yes, mainly security concerns. The last time I have tried pimatic-ifttt about year ago triggering actions worked fine for me. However, pimatic-ifttt needs some touch-up:

• Some changes are required for pimatic 0.9
• The plugin already uses the Maker channel by using the ifttt-webhook package. This package has not been updated for a long time and there may be better packages available now.
• A trigger mechanism should be added to be able to send IFTTT events via pimatic rules. That’s very easy to do.

I have write access to the plugin project and I am to collaborate on the matter.

That sounds good - would be really great to have a user friendly possibility to connect with IFTTT as I’d really appreciate the potential and I’m not the brightest candle on the cake when it comes to code my own way through…
By when do you think you would be able to do this adjustments?

Alternatively I wonder if it would work using the pimatic API and the “Make a web request” possibility in the Maker channel. But I don’t know exactly what to put in URL, Method, Content Type and Body…

@mwittig I wonder if you found the time to look into this
I stumbled across a new use case where IFTTT could be used to allow controlling your home with the logitech harmony hub: https://forum.pimatic.org/topic/2218/new-plugin-for-logitech-harmony-hub/26