IFTTT Particle Applets have gotten S L O W

I have been running a particle (photon) applet on IFTTT for 4+ years. Ran 8600 times. It responds to a published event and sends a text message. The IFTTT applet used to run within about 10 seconds of the photon event so the text message came quickly. Now it is taking anywhere from 2 minutes to 90 (NINETY) minutes to run and IFTTT reports an average of one hour. Of course, IFTTT blames particle.io for these delays. But the event I publish contains a timestamp and the Photon goes out every 15 minutes to update its local clock to ensure the time stamp is always accurate. So I can see the text message at 6 pm, for example, and read in the event that it triggered at 5:15 pm. .

This L O N G delay in receiving the text message has made this application nearly useless. To find out 90 minutes later that the even triggered is meaningless. Imagine if this was reporting a fire.

Is anyone else experiencing similar delays in IFTTT from published particle.io events? IFTTT just blames Particle for it.

Would you be interested in recreating your IFTTT applet(s) with the Webhook Trigger? You would need to create a Webhook in the Particle Console for each topic but you wouldn't need to change the firmware on your device.

I recommended using webhooks to trigger IFTTT in this thread:

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Yep, I’ve seen the same thing. Got so fed up with it a few months ago that I switched over to webhooks, they’ve run instantly and reliably ever since.

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I have used web hooks with IFTTT for a couple of years and it has worked reliably for a home project where it is active multiple times per hour 24/7.

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I have taken the advice and created a new IFTTT applet to take a Webook. The old way was to publish the event (EventName) that IFTTT was looking for as a Particle event . I created a name for the Webhook on The particle integration console and it is triggered by EventName. EventName has a value which is a text string. I see in the webhook form that is carried in the hook as “data”=“particle_event_value” which would be my string. The question is, what is the form in my IFTTT message to have this string (data) appear in the email I am generating from the event? {{data}} doesn’t work and {{value1=data}} does not work. What is the correct IFTTT format so the data of my trigger event is included?

{“data”}} doesn’t work either. But the EventName data is being transferred to IFTTT as field posted as “data”. IFTTT reports unrecognized imgredient {{data}} when I include it in the body text of the email generated by IFTTT.

There may be more ways of doing this, but I have set up a “request type” POST, “Web Form”, “Form fields” Custom, and not filled anything in there.

But the URL is
https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{{PARTICLE_EVENT_VALUE}}/with/key/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
where x’s are my key

And if you do it that way how do you refer to the event data when trying to pass it in the “Then” action. What {{name}} carries the data passed.

The default Particle webhook is passing event, data, coreid and a time stamp to IFTTT. But I don’t know how to represent those 4 fields in a Then clause where I wish to fill in the data associated with these 4 names.

It seems to me that the IFTTT Webhook is looking for up to 3 parameters specifically called Value1, Value2 and Value3. So I edited the form being seen from the Particle Webhook so the form includes the field Value1={{{PARTICLE_EVENT_VALUE}}} . Then In the body of the IFTTT Gmail I am generating, I specified to Include Value1 in the body a,omg with other text. But the other text appears but not the data sent as Value1.

So for those of you that successful have an operating Webhook from Paricle to IFTTT, how are you getting event data published to be picked up by IFTTT in order to include that data as part of the output generated at IFTTT.

Even changed the Particle Webhook to use JSON and only Included an assignment for “Value1”. And IFTTT still shows Value1 as empty and does not include the particle_event_value which happened to be a text string which I am trying to include in the generated gmail.

And the answer is —>

If you wish to pass the value of a particle event in a webhook to IFTTT the webhook must set “value1” = {{{PARTICLE_EVENT_VALUE}}},
(I used JSON format), or use value2 or value3. It must start with a lower case “v”. On the other hand, when including the value in the IFTTT outbound message that might be created, it is called Value1, Value2, or Value3 with a capital “V”.

It is working now. Thank everyone for the advice to change from IFTTT monitoring for the posting of an event, to using a webhook to push event updates out from the Particle infrastructure to IFTTT. Now the applet at IFTTT is running within seconds (which it did when IFTTT was a new service more than 4 years ago) but had deteriorated to 90 minutes to get to checking for an event change,

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It seems ifttt has maybe blacklisted one of my devices? I can publish and see it in my console but ifttt can’t seem to see them. Bummer. I really do not want the complication of webhooks.

Best laid plans - So with Webhooks it appears that IFTTT applets are being executed within seconds of a Particle event. This applet is causing a Gmail to be sent as a result. But that Gmail has come as much as 45 minutes after the event. This is hardly real time notification of an event occurance.

IFTTT must have a very long Gmail output queue to service and is pacing the rate at which it sends emails.

Note also that IFTTT is changing to a subscription (Pro) model if you need more than 3 applets. I don’t recall the other limitations if you stay with the free service. Multiple actions are now possible with the Pro service.

Hey Jay,

Do you NEED an SMS or a phone notification would do it for your use case?

A phone notification like so:

I documented a webhook plus Pushbullet integration here in case it is of interest to you. I still use this mechanism today and the notifications arrive at my devices (computer, phone, and/or tablet) in less than 5 seconds.
Gustavo.

Is anyone aware of how to send a true SMS message via IFTTT?

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