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Know How 36: Simple Home Automation using the Belkin WeMo


G+_iyaz akhtar
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The X-10 home automation can do things similar to the Belkin WeMo. It can be found on this website link http://www.x10.com/promotions/cm15a_complete_special_2013.html?feat6 I would suggest doing another home automation using the X-10 products they have a wide variety of products that can be controlled via iPhone and or android device. It can even set up timers and also turn on and off lights by the sunrise and sunset.

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Got a great tip from Chris Patrone

 

" I was listening to your tutorial on how to automate a light turning on when receiving an SMS message though Thunderbird.  You can actually speed up the notification time from 1 minute wait to instant response using Gmail's IMAP and a small change to your settings.

 

Once you set up your gmail account with IMAP, enable "Check for messages at start up".  Disable the check for new email every x minutes option.  

 

With this set up Gmail will push the emails to Thunderbird instead of Thunderbird looking for the messages.  Hope this tip helps speed up your automated communication :) " 

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Just caught this podcast. Using Thunderbird rather than all in the cloud does not seem too practical for this type of application. How about using Google Docs script?

 

Go to Google Docs and create a new spreadsheet, then choose "Script Editor" from the "Tools" menu. Then using what is similar to javascript, you can search Inbox and send an email to IFTTT. Have not tried it, but the code should not be too difficult to do. Something like this.

 

function checkForSMS() {    

 

 // Search for any new messages with SMS in the subject

 var inboxSMS = GmailApp.search("in:inbox subject:SMS");

 var count = inboxSMS.length;

 

 // Any SMS messages?

 if (count > 0) {

 

 // Archive the SMS messages to prevent triggering again.

 GmailApp.moveThreadsToArchive(inboxSMS);

 

 // Send an email to IFTTT.

 GmailApp.sendEmail('trigger@ifttt.com','New SMS Message', 'SMS message just received.');

 

 }

 

}

 

Then use a trigger to run the script function every minute.

 

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/gmail/

 

 

Turning on a light when getting an SMS is not a real practical application, but you got me thinking about other creative technical applications. This is what I love about the show.

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