End Goal: When I finish a bike ride, I want a notification to appear on my smart watch asking me if I want to open the garage door. I want to be able to confirm that notification directly from my smart watch causing the garage door to open.
Reason: My phone is typically buried in my saddle bag, and I don't want to have to dig it out to open the garage door. Similarly, I don't want my garage door opening by accident, so I want to explicitly confirm the trigger. If I can respond directly from my watch, I could even have the garage door opening as I coast into my driveway.
I'm looking for ideas to get the above end goal working. I have a plan, but it feels overly complicated. The tricky part is responding to the notification from my Garmin smart watch and I'm looking for suggestions to make that step more straightforward. If possible, I'd also like to remove IFTTT from the loop, but that isn't required.
Assumptions
For the sake of this post, let's assume:
- I already have a method that I can use to detect when I arrive home from a bike ride. However, I don't trust that I won't get false positives, so I want to give some kind of confirmation before triggering an action based on arriving home. I don't want my garage door opening by accident.
- I already have a way to open my garage door from Hubitat. I'm still working on those details, but I don't need to discuss that in this post.
Current Plan
- When Hubitat detects I've arrived home, I can call a URL at IFTTT using their "Webhook" integration.
- Create a rule at IFTTT: if "Webhook: Receive a web request with a JSON" then "Android SMS: Send an SMS" to my Google Voice phone number with a message saying "Should I open the garage door?"
- My Garmin watch will display the text message I've received, and allow me to respond with one of several pre-canned messages, including "Yes".
- Responding on my watch will generate a new SMS message back to my regular phone number with the message "Yes".
- Create a rule at IFTTT: If "Android SMS: New SMS received from phone number" with an additional filter to make sure the body of the message is "Yes", then "Hubitat: Open a device" to open my garage door.
I'll probably add an additional step, where instead of directly opening my garage door, IFTTT toggles a virtual switch, and only when that switch is toggled within a few minutes of my arriving home from a bike ride will it actually open my garage door. This would be an additional security measure, so that my garage door doesn't open any time a text is sent from Google Voice to my regular phone number.
That is the "simplest" strategy I could come up with, but it seems like there must be a better way.
- If I could find a way to generate a notification with an "action button", then my Garmin watch will allow me to trigger that action directly from my watch, but I think that means I would need a custom application on my phone to both trigger the notification and respond to the action. I've considered writing a custom Android app, but it would be even better if something like that was built-in to either IFTTT or Hubitat directly.
- This method relies on having two different phone numbers sending texts back and forth, but that was the only way I could come up with to allow my watch to respond to a notification in a way that I could react to.
Are there other suggestions?
