Fingbox doesn’t officially support IFTTT yet, however we have found a little work around to make the digital fence tool work with IFTTT. Allowing you to trigger anything connected to your IFTTT account.
This is especially useful for monitoring your smart tech, as great as it is we know things go down unexpectedly. In the example, we made we have made our Philips Hue lights change colour as devices ‘go down’. This means you can fix the problem before you want to use the device.
Alternatively this could be used to visually alert you if someone enters or leaves your network.
It’s worth noting this solution is not real time due to the fact it uses email as a communication method. When testing it these are the response times we had:
14:52 – Device online on network
14:52 – Device taken offline by removing power
14:58 – Email received
15:00 – Light changed to alert us device offline
If you don’t know what Fingbox is read our Fingbox review here.
How to connect Fingbox to IFTTT
Requirements:
- Fing account – set to a GMAIL email address
- IFTTT account
- Gmail account
- Fingbox
- Something connected to IFTTT
1. Open the Fing app, sign in to your account. It’s important the email address for the account is Gmail.
2. Select devices
3. Select the device you want to trigger IFTTT when it’s state changes. In this example we are selecting our Sonos AMP.
4. Name the device
5. Enable ‘alert me when state changes’. You will now get an email when this device joins or leaves the network.
6. Check the device you are monitoring is on the network. Remove power from the device, and check you get an email. There can be a slight delay here as Fing notices the device has gone and an email is sent. Make a note of the subject of the email, for example ours is:
A device went DOWN: Sonos AMP @ Home
7. Go to IFTTT website and if you don’t already have it enabled, enable Gmail connection. If you don’t like giving them access to your emails you can easily setup a separate account just for this.
8. Create a new Applet, selecting GMAIL as the service.
9. Select Email in inbox from search.
10. In the ‘Search for’ box you need to enter below where XXXX is add the name of the device and your network as shown in the email subject you got above:
from:alert@fing.io subject:A device went DOWN: XXXXXXXXX
11. Click Create Trigger
12. Now select whatever you want to do when the device goes down. Click the +
In this example we want one of our Philips Hue lights red
12. Click Create Action and its ready.
Now you understand the principle this can be applied to any part of Fingbox that alerts you via email. Simpy adjust the search trigger.
Hope that is useful, let us know in the comments how you get on.
Follow us on Twitter & Facebook for more Smart Home How To’s, reviews and news 🙂