Zapier Home Automation Recipes

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One of the best advantage of using Zapier to connect all your devices and online cloud accounts is that they have a few major advantages over a service like IFTTT.

Major Advantage with Using Zapier with Home Automation

Zapier has a webhook JSON trigger so you can easily take data from a source and input it the way you want somewhere else.

Using KimonoLabs.com and Zapier together make programming easier.

Recipes

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Activator and Automation Tools

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Introduction

Activator is the ultimate automation tool for iOS but it requires that you jailbreak your device first.  It has a ton of features that you should be using to optimize your day and save you time completing tasks around the house or just walking around the city.

Plugins

Tweaks can create plugins to launch tasks based on the plugins trigger.  There are lots of tweaks that have integrated Activator.  Some of our favourites include:

  • Activate Command
  • AirPlayServer
  • GooGiri
  • NowNow
  • Programmable SMS

Types of Triggers

You can create tasks based on:

  • Application Launch
  • Battery Status
  • Icons, Swipes on the Screen
  • Wifi, Bluetooth, Emails, Messages, Time
  • Device Status
  • Button Presses (long, short, double and triple clicks)
  • Headset Status

Automate Your Phone | Create Scheduled Profiles

There are other ways to do this but we like using activator best.  To do this open Activator and select the ‘Anywhere’ and then select ‘More’  Here is where you can select Triggers for your profile.  In the example I’m going to choose is based on Time.  Select Scheduled and then select which days and then you can select what to do.

Make Your Device Aware

You can also make your device aware and act on where you are.  That way you can turn your radios on an off to save battery, launch apps, start XBMC (airplay) etc. Other examples:

  • Get in the car and have the bluetooth connection start the google maps app and turn on your location services.
  • Walk outside to the park where you start your run and have a profile start (RunKeeper with Location services and volume up high for music with Bluetooth on).

Remotely Receive Commands

Every device should have setup the email triggers to launch certain devices, apps or profiles.  Examples could be:

  • Take a picture with the front camera (and sync to your iCloud photostream to view)
  • Start an IP camera for your local PC to stream to your remote device
  • Launch iBeaconTransmitter so your device can know when you arrive in the area to launch another app

Create Menus

Create a menu which can be activated with a trigger.  Ie. Launch a home lighting menu to control the lights in your home by triple clicking the home button.  This can provide 20 items to launch commands.  To do this click: ‘Menus’ -> ‘Add New Menu’ and then you can add actions to menu items.

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Activator Discussions

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EventGhost Help Guide and Review | A Must HAVE!

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What is it?

EventGhost is software to automate your Windows PC based on triggers (if this than that).  Once you follow a few guides on how to add triggers and actions it’s extremely powerful.  Download Eventghost here.

Example Trigger

EventGhost triggers are events that happen on your computer and are logged by EventGhost.  These can be used to create a ‘Macro’.  In the image above there are several ‘triggers’ that can be used by dragging the lightning bolt across to a new macros section on the right.

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Example Macros

Do you notice the lightning bolt there? That is a trigger that has been dragged to the ‘unnamed macro’.  It can include any type of trigger and then can have any action(s) after that.

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Adding Parameters

Lets say you want to add what was said from the AutoRemote message into a custom script that you made.  The first step is to add the line {eg.event.payload.arcomm} into the command line options section and then you can send it to something that happens on your PC.  In the example above I sent it to a food log.

Sample Useful Recipes

  1. Create a good morning scene which controls your lights.  You can integrate it with any home automation system by launching GET requests.
  2. Have an aquarium movie-loop pop up when you aren’t doing anything for a while.
  3. Send an AutoRemote notification when a new download is finished.

Other Manuals

If you are looking to get more information on how to setup basic examples you can try this manual.  Also check out the list of plugins you can use.

So what can you do?

See what you can do with XBMC, Tasker and Yatse and EventGhost here

Other Youtube Videos

Here are some good youtube videos with regardes to EventGhost which you should try.

  1. Basic Setup
  2. Copy Text from your Phone to your PC
  3. EventGhost and AutoRemote

EventGhost Recipe Forums

Our Review

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