IFTTT: The Phone Connected

Updated for 2019 China-US Young Maker Competition

Introduction

For one of my projects I needed a simple way to send notifications to my mobile phone when something happens on my Raspberry Pi (email was not a good option, wanted something more natural and native for mobile platform). I found great, really great service platform IFTTT. And there are different articles about it on Hackster as well, however they are outdated because IFTTT migrated their Maker Channel to new concept Webhooks. So I decided to share my experience with Webhooks and post this extremely simple protip (unfortunately there is no extremely easy difficulty option), it takes around 10 minutes to implement.

I added several device types to insure this approach is supported completely independent on platform, programming language etc. unless it is not possible to do HTTP GET/POST request.

Get Started With IFTTT

Go to ifttt.com and simply use your Google or Facebook account to sign up, or you can create IFTTT account from scratch using preferable email.

Install mobile version of IFTTT on your phone from Google Play or App Store, depending on your phone OS and sign in with the same authentication method used for web step above.

Create Webhook Applet

Let's create new Webhooks applet. Please follow step by step instruction below:

Now search for Webhooks service and setup it:

Now search for Notifications service and set it up:

And here is your new Webhooks applet:

Test Webhook

Now it is time to test your Webhooks applet. Webhooks accept GET and POST requests, with POST request you can also send some JSON data if needed for more complex events. We are going to use GET request for simplicity.

Open Webhooks Service page or find it through My Applets => Services => Enter "Webhooks" in Filter Services. Then click "Documentation":

Now enter event name you selected during Webhooks service setup, in my example it was "Test" and click "Test It" button, optionally you can provide JSON data and test POST method.

And here is our phone notification from IFTTT mobile app:

That's it! Reading this article takes longer than actual implementation, doesn't it?

As it is just HTTP request you can easily use that URL link from anywhere (IoT devices, other apps etc.) to trigger this event and get your phone notified.

If you need just to check the Webhooks service key you can proceed to service settings:

And get/check your secret key you can also check service activity as well:

Bonus

And now some small bonus to give (hopefully) idea, insight for further usage of IFTTT platform with your IoT projects or other creative ideas. I was looking forward for simple mobile phone notification for my smart camera with motion detection project. When motion is detected camera records video and immediately uploads it to Google Drive, so I needed simple way to get notified when motion is detected and video uploaded so I used IFTTT in connection with Google Drive and Notifications services.

Here is illustrated step by step brief manual:

That's it! Again it is really simple and straightforward implementation. The only difference this applet requires a bit more time to be activated, in my case around one hour.

Now you can simply test it by adding new video (or other file if you choose other triggers) to selected during service setup Google Drive folder and you should get IFTTT mobile app notification.