Absolutely, I have medication that I have to take the 72 hours so I have a recipe that the checks Google calendar for the event that says "medication", and when the recipe finds it at 7:15 AM every 3rd day it makes all of the LIFX bulbs in the house flash green. This is my only reminder as relying upon these recipes for life-saving medication is not a good idea, but it has been an excellent aid d'memoir which hasn't let me down once in about 3 years.
I am quadriplegic and IFTTT as the central hope the so many different aspects of my life that I would be completely lost without it, it's a brilliant tool for disabled people even though it wasn't designed as such. I must have 30 or 40 recipes that I use on a daily basis for things ranging from medication reminders, turning the lights on and off, controlling the fan in my bedroom, turning the lights off in the house when I go out and turning them back on again when I come home amongst loads of other things. It would take something pretty spectacular to tempt me away from their service.
That said, not entirely convinced about the new changes, maybe it's just teething troubles but I've had problems with a couple of recipes over the past week that have been rock solid for at least 3 years so hopefully they will settle down because that would be fairly catastrophic failure if they didn't.
> ...turning the lights on and off, controlling the fan in my bedroom, turning the lights off in the house when I go out and turning them back on again when I come home amongst loads of other things.
Do you have some sort of smart-home controller that controls these devices (e.g. a Wink or SmartThings hub) and IFTTT integrates with said controller? If so, what about the hub is insufficient and requires you to use IFTTT?
I ask because as someone who thinks IFTTT is neat, every time I look at any recipes especially regarding home automation, I don't see anything that I couldn't do with home-assistant or even with my Wink hub or Veralite controller when I used those. Instead, it looks like I'd just be offloading functionality onto a remote service that adds yet another failure point to the system.
No, I try to avoid any kind of hub because I don't want to be locked into one particular way of doing things. That's why I chose LIFX over Philips Hue, LIFX bulbs are just plugged in, connected to Wi-Fi and controlled from an app on your iPhone, iPad or laptop and away you go. I didn't want a cupboard full of hubs controlling lots of discrete bits of the house, a hubbard if you will.
So if there is any centre to my system then it is my iPhone and iPad, and I make sure that whichever piece of home automation I buy it has some ability to connect to If This Then That. This has been made infinitely easier with the new Make channel, which means I can just send a POST request from any old bash script to trigger any number of actions.
I've never heard of any of the three things you mentioned, but unless they were all capable of being controlled from the one device, in this case my iPhone then it would be virtually impossible for me to use them. You see the iPhone has world-class access for disabled people, I can do everything with one switch on my wheelchair that an able-bodied person can do with their two hands. Normally disabled access to devices is some terrible and crippled subset of functionality that we've been stuck with, that's when those of us with motor skill difficulties are even thought of at all, for most people disabled means blind and deaf and that's doubly true in technology circles. There is no other group of devices that a quadriplegic and just take out of the box and start using within five minutes then the iPhone, iPhone and any of the computers running OS X, believe me I've searched!
At the moment I have one iPhone with a series of apps, I also have DragonDictate for Mac on my laptop and iMac which allows me to pair up voice commands with AppleScript's and bash scripts. Which means that the number of things I can do is literally endless as long as the piece of hardware I bought has some ability to be controlled via the network.
That's what interests me so much about this project, I would love to bring something that can do what IFTTT can do in-house and maybe run it on a Raspberry Pi so that I'm only reliable on my local network and not the Internet. That would be awesome.
Anyway, I'm going to stop rambling and hope that I've answered some of your questions! I'm happy to answer any you might have, I'm also open to any new idea that would help me control bits of my house more easily.
I have a couple of websites where I detail this sort of stuff, robotsandcake.org is my not-for-profit stuff where I give talks at places like Google and for the UK foreign office in Mexico discussing how technology impacts the disabled, and I also have inventability.net which is basically a collection of hacks and tricks that my partner and I have learned over the past 10 years of my being quadriplegic. That's only been going a few months, so it's still a little light on content but if there's anything you see missing and you'd like me to explain I'd be happy to make a post about it!
Anyway, the people at IFTTT are lovely and I don't want to hurt their feelings by cheating on them behind their back with this young upstart! :-)
That sounds amazing, but the dependency you're getting into makes me feel a bit uneasy. Surely your stuff can be ported somehow if something happens to the infrastructure you're relying upon?
Oh, I completely agree that I have massive single point of failure here, believe me! But it's such a convenient and easy-to-use single point of failure that it is almost irresistible, as I mentioned in another reply I would love to be able to bring the functionality that I get from IFTTT inside by network and run it on something like a Raspberry Pi, that would be great.
At the moment I'm relying upon lots of discrete apps all glued together with one web service, now if the web service stops working I can still turn the lights on and off using the LIFX app and I can still control my heating using the Heatmiser app; but what I can't do it any of the logic stuff that I find so useful, turn the heating on at X time and make the lights are lovely warm colour at the same time sort of thing.
I'd love devices that respond to simple post requests that I can run with bash scripts, over 10 years of experimentation that seems to be about the most stable system I've seen.
But yes, if IFTTT stops working tomorrow and it's going to be a major pain in my bottom and I'm going to have to recreate a lot of my systems from scratch. Which is why the search for robust systems under my control is never really going to end.
I am quadriplegic and IFTTT as the central hope the so many different aspects of my life that I would be completely lost without it, it's a brilliant tool for disabled people even though it wasn't designed as such. I must have 30 or 40 recipes that I use on a daily basis for things ranging from medication reminders, turning the lights on and off, controlling the fan in my bedroom, turning the lights off in the house when I go out and turning them back on again when I come home amongst loads of other things. It would take something pretty spectacular to tempt me away from their service.
That said, not entirely convinced about the new changes, maybe it's just teething troubles but I've had problems with a couple of recipes over the past week that have been rock solid for at least 3 years so hopefully they will settle down because that would be fairly catastrophic failure if they didn't.
Still, 9/10 would recommend!