Since we launched Olisto Connect, we’ve seen quite a few interesting projects that are made with Olisto. With Olisto Connect we open up all the different Olisto channels to your own projects. You can connect your own Arduino or any other hardware device that can send a webrequest.
We want cover these users on our blog and today we have Stefan to talk about how he connected Olisto to en open source home automation project.
Who are you?
I am Stefan Nienhuis and I’m eleven years old. I go to the elementary school, I’m in group 8. Together with my father, mother and three brothers I live in Meppel, The Netherlands. In my spare time I am programming my own apps and games.
What did you build?
I made a connection between Olisto and the open-source project Homebridge. This is a server to connect your non-Homekit appliances to Homekit. Homekit is proprietary Apple protocol they released in 2014. This makes it possible to create a new line in Google Sheets when someone gets on your WiFi network. The great thing is, you can combine this with other home bridge plugins. For example, a plugin that looks for someone to come home. If someone enters the house you can do specific actions on it.
Before Olisto existed, I always used IFTTT, but that lacked something important for me: I wanted to perform multiple actions and conditions within a trigger. Another roadblock is that IFTTT doesn’t support the Eneco Toon thermostat. So when I read about Olisto I was very enthousiastic to get started with it.
You can run Homebridge on your own computer, but it is more convenient to run it on a Raspberry PI. A Raspberry PI costs about € 45 and there are tons of tutorials on how to install Homebridge on a Raspberry PI.
Why did you make this?
We already had a Raspberry Pi at home with Homebridge on it. So when Olisto Connect was released my dad and I thought it would be a fun project to see if we could connect the two. It would be great if more people make these connections between Olisto and Homebridge and we can share them.
How did you make this?
It’s actually pretty straight forward. When you install the Olisto plugin for Homebridge, all you have to do is create a Connector at Olisto Connect. You get an unique URL you put in the code and that’s it. After that you can make your own triggs in Olisto.
You can find an extensive explanation at my Github page including how to connect a Homekit sensor to Olisto.
Thanks to Stefan for a great explanation and idea on how you can use Olisto Connect. Would you like to be featured on our blog with your Olisto Connect project? Let us know via e-mail on frank.meeuwsen@triggi.com or send us a message on Twitter or Facebook.
