Accessing generic weather information on your smartphone is common these days. But what about custom, condition-based alerts? For instance to

• Inform your employees automatically about severe weather conditions hampering their morning travel to your office
• Dispatch snow removal teams
• Set sails if there are high winds

Custom mobile alerts can easily be set up with an automation tool and SIGNL4. The following example shows a temperature alert if the temperature drops below 0 °C / 32 °F, i.e. when you might expect frost and slippery streets. However, you can easily adapt the example for humidity, wind speed, UV index or pollen count.

What you need:

1. A SIGNL4 account (https://www.signl4.com) to persistently deliver critical alerts to the right people
2. A free IFTTT account (https://ifttt.com) to automate the weather query and trigger an alert under certain conditions

 

How it works

In IFTTT (IF THIS THAN THAT) you can create a new applet: “If current temperature drops below 0°C, then make a web request”.

For doing so, you can define the IF part and select the “Weather Underground” service. When you add this service for the first time you can choose your location. Then you add the trigger “Current temperature drops below” and configure it accordingly.

 

For the THEN part you select “Webhooks” and then “Make a web request”. You can put your SIGNL4 Webhook URL here. Please note that the “Content Type” must be “application/json”. In the “Body” part you can insert placeholders that then translate to the actual weather data from Weather Underground. The whole configuration will then look like this.

That’s it. And of course you can adapt it according to your needs. The next time the temperature drops below 0 °C / 32 °F you will get a Signl on your SIGNL4 app

 

What else is possible?

IFTTT offers a broad range of triggers (i.e. the IF part). You can combine this very easily with SIGNL4. For example, you can get notifications about new Tweets and RSS feeds from your IoT or smart home devices. If you have your own great idea, please let us know via Twitter.