How to Automate Your Home With an IFTTT-Enabled Router
I love automation; I do. I just think this is the funniest thing to ever walk into my house and immediately have my smart lights display some kind of colorful scene – not to mention all the absurd configurations I can create that change their colors and brightness when certain things happen, ranging from “I got a tweet” to “Midnight, why are you still awake, go to sleep.”
Before Lifehacker, I spent years researching wireless routers, but until recently I had no way of knowing what it was like to connect to IFTTT. And now that I have, I don’t think I want to use the one that cannot .
IFTTT isn’t the most complete service, but it’s really fun
If you haven’t heard of IFTTT (If This, Then That), here’s a quick guide. The online tool allows you to connect different applications and services to each other. So, if something happens in one – for example, someone mentions you in a tweet – then you can trigger something to happen in another, for example, by flipping a smart switch connected to a nearby lamp. This is a silly example, but IFTTT gives you a lot of possibilities for triggers and actions.
You can use your device’s location services to let your equipment and services take action when you get in or out of your home, such as turning on the ceiling fan when you get home. I find it even more convenient to trigger these actions when connected to or disconnected from a wireless network.
Here’s my setup: I have a few Philips Hue lamps in my room, and I love having them dim when I get home because I’m too lazy to press the adjacent Hue Tap (or pull out my phone and press a button). scene manually). While the Hue iOS app can trigger scenes when it detects that you are arriving or leaving a specific geofence, this imaginary circle around my house is not as tight as I would like.
Whenever I used location-based triggers in my Hue app, I would often find myself leaving the house, which automatically turns off the lights and then accidentally triggers an “on” action while driving past the nearest Freeway. Hue often seems to think that I was trapped in my invisible “I’m at home” bubble. Then, for some reason, my lights just kept on – perhaps Hue had a bit of a headache as I quickly entered and exited the geofence.
Regardless of the cause, the result annoyed me: my lights burned for hours when I was not at home, this is the situation I tried to avoid by setting up convenient “when you come / when you leave” actions.
Now that I’m experimenting with Google Wifi that can connect to IFTTT, I love that I can trigger actions when certain devices connect to or leave my wireless network. In my case, now my room lights turn on and off when my phone turns on and off via Wi-Fi. (I even have a little notification running on the IFTTT app to let me know when this happens, to be honest and to ensure my lights are off all weekend when I’m out of town.)
However, there is still a lot more I can do with a trigger: write “I’m home!” Twitter posts, prioritize specific devices when they connect to my Google Wi-Fi, set a specific temperature in our home Nest when a device is connected, play a song from a nearby Android device every time another device connects, etc. There are many options, with playable – many of them silly but still fun to explore.
Does your router support IFTTT?
I’m in luck: getting Google Wifi to work with IFTTT couldn’t be easier. Other manufacturers like TP-Link , Asus, and Netgear ( sort of ) have routers that support IFTTT, but that’s not a guarantee for every router. Not only will your 3 year old router get some kind of firmware update to make it work with this service, but this is the exception and not the rule that newer routers support IFTTT.
And this is insulting. While the service isn’t perfect – I still can’t get Google Wifi to firethe Last Countdown from my Google Home whenever I walk through the door – it’s still great for some aspects of home automation. While I have other, more powerful routers that I could set up instead of Google Wifi (I’m shaking my head at AC1200), they don’t support IFTTT, and it’s too convenient to set rules for wireless access than location.
In an ideal world, router manufacturers would allow you to link each hardware product to an online account, and then you could use that online account with other connected services to extend the functionality of your home in new and exciting ways.
We are not quite there yet – and I hope that someday we will reach this point, especially as the popularity of mesh networks grows. (I thought it took ages to go from complex web-based router UIs to easy-to-use customization apps.) I just want my house to do stupid things whenever I come home. … Is it really that much to ask?