How to trigger IFTTT action from openHAB

I’m looking for a way to trigger a IFTTT action from openHAB, i.e. doing the same thing as if I press an IFTTT Button Widget on my smartphone.

Use case: I’ve got a SwitchBot Hub Mini and want to issue an IR command to a connected device. IFTTT offers such functionality for use on my smartphone. Now I’m looking for a way to issue the command from openHAB.

All I find when looking for communication between openHAB and IFTTT on the web refers to the other direction, i.e. IFTTT reacting on state changes in openHAB via myOpenHAB.org.

Does anyone have experience here?

That functionality was disabled because people abused it, overloading the server. you need to set up your own hosted cloud server now.

Too bad :confused:

I think maintaining an own cloud server is beyond my capabilities.

People were exporting all their items to the cloud server instead of just the ones they needed. That overwhelmed the server, causing it to crash. :frowning:

The Foundation cannot charge for services and does not have the resources to expand the server capabilities.

Do you know if they have considered some kind of rate limiting to ensure “proper” usage of the service?

I think that would be a @digitaldan question.

The issues with IFTTT happened a year ago and have been discussed at length, so I don’t think there’s a need to rehash it. Dan knows that some folks would like IFTTT support to come back, so if he’s able to bring it back in the future I’m sure he will.

If you just want to send commands out, you could use webhooks to trigger IFTTT. You won’t get any response from the device in openHAB, since it’s a one-way street, but that’s already the case with IR commands. @Jens_M wrote a quick tutorial for doing just that, and it’s relatively easy to implement. I’ve used webhooks with IFTTT before, but not with openHAB.

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This conversation got me thinking about something I considered awhile back, which is to have openHAB put my Windows PC to sleep when I leave the house or go to bed. I’ve just implemented that using IFTTT webhooks and a Windows app called AssistantComputerControl.

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@rpwong Thank you for you hints on webhooks and also ACC, I’ll definately have a look at it!

I’ve also contacted the vendor for details on the API, maybe there’s another way to integrate it into openHAB – but I think, your hint with the webhook seems the most promising!

You could always try this. I just searched for SwitchBot API.

If you’ve got the skills, maybe this could be the start of a SwitchBot binding?

EDIT: Looks like this is actually for controlling the Switchbots directly via BLE, and someone got it working earlier this year.

Just an update on my experiences with IFTTT: the service stopped working for me suddenly without any changes on my side… IFTTT support does not answer on my emails.

Solution: I’ve created a new IFTTT account and connected it to SwitchBot again – and it works again! I hope, it will keep working.

One thing I noticed: the new API key is now 44 digits long, before it was 22 digits long. Maybe this helps someone else out there…