
Trigger Happy: An opensource clone of IFTTT - vmorgulis
https://trigger-happy.eu/
======
kmf
Is there anyone relying on IFTTT (or Huginn, or this) for non-trivial things?

There was never any vital day-to-day things I could build with IFTTT: I could
email myself the daily forecast or things like that, but it was never a killer
app for me. Most of the popular recipes[1] I see on IFTTT seem like fun little
annoyances that would ultimately get distracting.

If it's really crucial to how you work day-to-day, what are you doing with it?

[1]: [https://ifttt.com/discover](https://ifttt.com/discover)

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escapologybb
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.

Still, 9/10 would recommend!

~~~
crymer11
> ...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.

~~~
escapologybb
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! :-)

~~~
crymer11
If you're interested in running things in-house, you should definitely take a
look at home assistant.[0]

Also, if you haven't already, check out the Amazon Echo; it has pretty solid
support for a lot of home automation tech.

\-- [0] - [https://home-assistant.io/](https://home-assistant.io/)

~~~
escapologybb
Thanks, will do!

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danso
There's also the hugely popular Huginn, if you're on a Ruby stack (Trigger
Happy seems to run on Django)
[https://github.com/cantino/huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn)

~~~
tokenizerrr
Huginn is great, but I wish it was easier to chain stuff together. Node RED
has an awesome UI, but the building blocks are aimed at something else
entirely.

~~~
tectonic
What sort of stuff do you find hard to build?

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tokenizerrr
Scrapers of sites that involve some conversion of data. The main gripe is that
you can't modify a flow of agents in a single interface, so adjusting stuff
involves a lot of going back and forth.

~~~
tectonic
Agreed- we hope for Scenarios to evolve into this eventually, but I agree that
it can be clicky right now for big changes.

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simplify
Seems like the perfect kind of app to build on sandstorm.io, since it's
something you'd probably want to own on your own servers.

~~~
icebraining
I don't think Sandstorm can run daemons or cron jobs as of yet - the apps are
stopped after a bit if the user logs off.

~~~
mnutt
I think support for cron jobs is coming soon, but the other challenge is that
they're still working out the best way to allow apps to make outbound network
connections. It's doable now, but requires administrator access.

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k2xl
I love IFTTT, but one of the biggest missing features is the ability to do If
This ... OR this ... Then That... And That And That.

Unfortunately, all of the recipes are one dimensional - so you can't build
recipes like "When my nest thermostats senses someone is nearby AND it is
8AM-10AM in morning and it is December or January then turn on the heat on.

If IFTTT implemented this feature there would be a TON of killer recipes out
there.

There's a company out there called Yonami (www.yonami.com) that has an app for
mobile that sort of does this - but unfortunately it is a bit buggy and
doesn't integrate with as many apps.

~~~
mpfundstein
Hey. You can check out www.triggi.com . We support multiple conditions and
actions.

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AstroJetson
for HN, that's not your best page to start with. I'd go with this one
[https://blog.trigger-happy.eu/pages/informations.html](https://blog.trigger-
happy.eu/pages/informations.html)

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chrisper
Why did IFTTT become so bad with the recent changes? Why did they have to
"improve"?

The updated app is horrible to use compared to the old one.

~~~
Splendor
I'm not sure but I'm not happy with the change. I thought they did a great job
of making conditional logic easy for the masses through their 'recipes'. The
new applets hide what little complexity the service previously had and now its
just confusing to me.

~~~
klinquist
If you're on iOS (Android soon), try Stringify. Multiple ANDs/ORs/cascading
actions, etc *I work for Stringify

~~~
chrisper
I do not seem to be able to create a flow that when I push the button it will
call some URL with certain parameters. Does that exist?

~~~
klinquist
Yes - add the 'Maker' thing - it will send HTTP GET/POST/PUT.

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sofaofthedamned
Why the heck haven't Google bought this, or at least made their own clone?
It's a superb service.

~~~
quickben
The whole point of the service is to automate stuff so you don't have to open
their webpage ever again if done properly. This doesn't bring advertising
revenue in.

~~~
zimmund
On top of that, this kind of interactions are usually used by power users
(individuals, not business), so it wouldn't be as popular nor profitable as
they need (e.g.: Google Reader was a fantastic tool but they shut it down
anyway).

~~~
conradk
Are you sure ? What are you basing this on ?

I thought Zapier was mostly business, and it's been running for a while now:
[https://zapier.com/](https://zapier.com/)

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gegtik
i saw ifttt advertising an overhaul lately only to find you STILL can't join
two conditions (eg. if I leave work AND its past 5pm, send a text)

~~~
splitbrain
This. IFTTT is much too simplistic for anything useful. Sure I can let it save
all Gmail attachments to Google Drive. But if I want to do that for only
certain attachments I'm out of luck.

~~~
hasperdi
If you want to achieve this, you can use Google Apps Script.

I use it to forward certain mails to Slack and to do automatic Gmail clean up.

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pryelluw
Oh and its made with django. Nice. Going to give this a test drive.

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vxNsr
One of the great things about IFTTT is the number of services that are plugged
into it. (They number in the hundreds) this has about 10 which is nice but
nearly enough. Also the ones that make it a killer app for me are the gApps
integration which this lacks entirely.

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asow92
I can't take this website seriously. But the project seems interesting.

~~~
ThisIs_MyName
Yeah, another guy posted a better link: [https://blog.trigger-
happy.eu/pages/informations.html](https://blog.trigger-
happy.eu/pages/informations.html)

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aceperry
That's a name that I like.

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xparadigm
Loved the description of Trello. Kanban application. :)

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andrewchambers
The front page does a terrible job of explaining exactly what this product
does.

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arcyus
A little nitpick, the slider is hugely unnecessary.

~~~
foxmask
I wont be against some help for this main page :-) I just try to do my best .

