As i have equipped my home with some Hue lights, a NetAtmo and a few Raspberry Pi’s I came accross IFTTT like a year ago. This made it really easy to connect stuff and do things based on some IF statement. Like IF it starts to rain change my Hue light bulb to blue.
With this Recipe above i immediatly outline a huge issue that is missing from IFTTT, I’m still not able to choose multiple lights and as I have a lamp with 3 Spot Hue lights in it, it would be cool to update all 3 the lights and not just 1 or with multiple Recipes for all lights. Also you can only have 1 IF statement and not IF i’m at home and IF the time is like 12.00pm then do this. I’m missing these things as this would make my house really smarter, and in the end this is all we want!
Here it is, the solution… Stringify!
Well as Stringify is more flexibel with IF statements this is a great improvement! I now can have a Recipe or Flow as it is called in Stringify, that checks for multiple triggers. For example: IF my NetAtmo Noise is below 40 and it is like 23:45PM then turn off my living room lights (as i’m prob at sleep and missed the light button). With IFTTT we could only check for Time OR NetAtmo, resulting in lights turning off while there were some friends over for a beer. As it then is noisy (TV / talking / other sounds) i just put the trigger 4db above the measurement of my NetAtmo in the night for the last week so i’m sure the lights go off when no one is in the living room and the sound of my dishwasher in the kitchen is not that loud so the lights will keep on.
With this said, you can combine a lot of triggers, also it is possible to trigger an action for all the lights. Like if the CO2 level in my living room gets above 2250ppm turn all the living room lights RED instead of just 1 light.
Stringify or IFTTT
Both Stringify and IFTTT could work, but i think IFTTT is more adopted then Stringify. More services and smart devices work with IFTTT at this moment. Some things i found out:
- IFTTT has more support from devices / services etc.
- IFTTT has more recipes already “pre-cooked”
- Stringify can do a lot more with the triggers, you can make more complex Flows (or recipes if we are talking IFTTT language)
- Stringify has better HUE support (havent tested other devices just yet
- Stringify has a nice way of creating flows, drag / drop and select triggers
- Stringify is at this moment only working on iOS devices (app is not yet ready for Android at this moment)
It really depends on what you want to create, in my case I was able to addopt all my IFTTT Recipes to Stringify Flows and even could do more with Stringify because it can handle more triggers. But the support for other devices on Stringify is limited, I think this will come soon.