Integrating with Zapier

General
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This is a bit off topic, but hopefully there are others trying to accomplish this, and want to get involved.

i have been working on creating a zapier recipe for Spark.
if you arent familiar, zapier is like IFTTT but they allow you to write triggers and tasks. i also think they have much broader support of “channels” because of it…seriously, the list of supported API enabled services is amazing. https://zapier.com/status/

this would allow me to control my spark through almost any API. i could unlock my kegerator when i successfully commit to github. i could make a sandwich when i complete a google task…its endless.
so far ive got in working in a basic (albeit incomplete) form, and i wanted to share my progress, in case anyone else is trying something similar

First off, Authentication setup is pretty straightforward. I am asking for access_key and device_id when setting up a trigger or action.

Ive made the Device ID not required, since i want to be able to specify it later on as a selection (support for multiple cores in one recipe)

For authentication, I select API Key (Query String), and create an Auth Mapping.

Then I created a new Trigger for retrieving all the cores:

It has NO trigger fields (since no human or recipe will be directly interfacing with the trigger, it will just be used to populate dropdown lists)

Then for Data Source, it was pretty straightforward.

So then I created a new trigger for use by a recipe. This trigger is intended to check a variable generated by my Spark Core.

Here is the trigger screen to check the variable. The dynamic dropdown perfectly shows the list of available Spark Cores in my account!

At the bottom of the trigger page, I created a dynamic dropdown, which is populated by the “coreslist” trigger we just created. Now, if I add more Spark Cores to my account, they show up automatically!

So the last thing I do is create a URL trigger to pull the variable (in this case “position”). I tried to make this non-hardcoded, but had terrible luck.

So its getting there…but still not fully working.

But here is the result so far.
I create a recipe to check the Spark variable position, and then send an email.

The dynamic drop down is working nicely.

And the results seem to be working too! (correction, the results are not working…these results came from having a sample result JSON already populated)

All looks good…

Then I hit “Test Spark Trigger”

Doh!
If anyone has any experience with this, or just wants to recreate this for fun and see how it goes (Zapier is free)

Please share your experience.

Thanks!

3 Likes
2

Good news!

Spark does work as an Action on Zapier!

I just set up an Action with no fields, and a hard coded function call in the “where to send the data”


So now, I can call a Spark function from ANYTHING!

Here is a fun recipe.

5 Likes
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This is very cool, definitely an easy way to add functionality to the spark core.

If I’m reading this right, something to keep in mind with free accounts or even paid accounts, if you successfully commit to github, it might take up to 15 minutes before your kegerator unlocks xD

Do they run asynchronously like that?

Also, is a “Task” considered your Zap running once? So if you ran one continuously every 15 mins, it would stop after 25 hours (15 * 100 / 60) ?

Then premium would allow one full speed task for the entire month (15 * 3000 / 60 / 24 = 31.25 days)?

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In theory, if you use a polling method for your triggers (but thats not the “right” way).
the better way to do it is using “instant triggers” using hooks. they dont wait for the polling interval.

and this is all done with REST hooks. havent gotten them working with Spark yet, but my hope is that this is all built in to the spark cloud one day…

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Sorry for hijacking the thread but I think it’s better to ask here then to open a new thread.

What I would like is to create a weather mood light, ie a RGB LED strip that changes its colors according to the forecast.
I already set up a test program using TCPClient to connect to http://openweathermap.org/ which returns me some nice JSON data.

But I think the IFTTT/zapier approach would be nicer. However as we don’t know when we get IFTTT support for the spark I was looking at zapier. I could not find any triggers based on weather in zapier though.
Does any of you have an idea how I could get this working with the spark cloud instead of polling the weather forcast directly from my spark?

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ive neglected my zapier integration because im working on a spark project that does not currently need zapier. hopefully my work until now can help someone…
id be happy to answer direct questions if you start down the path of building a zapier integration. it should not require any coding…just a lot of configuration.