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I have a Raspberry Pi 3 with a breadboard that's got an RF transmitter & receiver. I can control 8 Etekcity outlets using Siri/Homekit via homebridge-commander/pilight, however I would like to take advantage of various IFTTT triggers to be able to control my 8 outlets automatically.

These RF outlets are dumb. The only way to turn them on/off is either via RF signal or a physical button. There's no option to talk to the outlets via any other means. I have a shell script I made for homebridge-commander that can control the outlets via etekcity_control.sh outlet_name powerstate set true/false.

I discovered that homebridge-ifttt only supports communication from RPi to IFTTT. I want to go the other way around. I want things on IFTTT to trigger the RPi to take actions (e.g. turn on or off an RF outlet).

The best solution would meet all of these criteria:

  • secure (no exposed ports and no sending of executable commands)
  • fast/responsive & reliable
  • automations can be enabled/disabled from iPhone from anywhere
  • small disk/processor/memory footprint
  • requires only installs & config, i.e. no custom coding
  • allows me to use any trigger available on IFTTT

(Plus, it would be really convenient if when I buy new outlets, I don't have to setup a third config file in addition to homebridge and homebridge-commander.)

I googled for options this past weekend, but had difficulty wading through all the flood of RPi->IFTTT solutions that don't support IFTTT->RPi.

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    This should be possible using webhooks. Here is a tutorial I found where something similar is achieved with the help of node-red: dev.to/krusenas/…
    – oh.dae.su
    Apr 16, 2019 at 15:52
  • NodeRed looks really cool! I will definitely be checking that and webhook relay out! Thanks!
    – hepcat72
    Apr 16, 2019 at 17:29
  • I should even be able to replace my Stringify flows with this!
    – hepcat72
    Apr 16, 2019 at 17:31
  • @oh-dae-su - That blog post had just what I needed (webhookrelay). It meets all of my wants except the ability to enable/disable (out of the box), though I have some ideas on how to implement that part. If you post it as an answer, I'll accept it.
    – hepcat72
    Apr 29, 2019 at 16:23
  • I am glad, that the comment was helpful. I have posted it as answer. :-) Good luck with your project!
    – oh.dae.su
    Apr 29, 2019 at 19:37

1 Answer 1

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To have a bidrectional communication between IFTTT and Raspberry Pi you can utilize the webhooks technology.

Here is a tutorial I found where something similar to your objective is achieved with the help of node-red. To be precise, in node-red the webhook-relay is used for the connection to IFTTT.

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  • Been using webhook relay and node red for so much! Thanks again!
    – hepcat72
    Feb 3, 2020 at 23:34
  • :-) same here... Glad you found it helpful.
    – oh.dae.su
    Feb 4, 2020 at 8:40

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