In another step on my journey in the IoT (Internet of Things) I recently decided to use one of the digital recipes from IFTTT (If this then that) to use the location service to send a text to someone when I have left a particular zone.

The actual configuration of this task is very easy using either the web or mobile tool.

Using the tool in this example, I chose the recipe ingredients that related to my mobile. In this case an Android phone.

The interface takes you through an the process by clicking the relevant icons and entering some simple information. I have flow charted the process below:

You can install the application on your mobile and sign in so that it knows about the tool. Its also important that when using location recipes that you also turn on the Location/GPS function on your device.

I tried this recipe yesterday and it worked well. However it didn’t activate straight away from leaving the location zone that I had set up. I’m assuming that this is something to do with the polling or location services on my mobile. To test this I have set up a couple of other similar recipes to see if I can make the text message a bit more instant. This will be tested over the next week.

The text message itself can contain a number of parameters “I exited an area {{OccurredAt}} via Android {{LocationMapUrl}}”  which did put some context into the text message.

{{OccurredAt}} provided a date and time

{{LocationMapUrl}} provided a location in google maps

You can remove these from the message if they are not needed.

There are lots of sample recipes and ones created by others that you can reuse, or the site has the ability to create your own.