Basic Apilio tutorial

[chipito]

Hi, I can’t seem to find a basic tutorial that walks you through all the concepts in Apilio, what all the terms mean, etc. Basically something written for someone who doesn’t write scripts for a living. If something like this exists please let me know (just looking at example scripts doesn’t help teach the fundamentals enough for me unfortunately).

Now that the integration with IFTTT is a little less complicated I think something like this would be very useful for anyone trying to use Apilio who hasn’t done any programming since high school.

[pebneter]

Have you come across this article yet? Getting started - an introduction to Apilio

[chipito]

Hi Philipp, yes I had but for some reason I couldn’t connect with it. I think I need to look at this on paper and work my way through it. It seems like that introduction should help so I will try again. I was hoping for something that introduced basic concepts with examples that then worked it’s way to more advanced concepts and also gave some strategies for how to determine how many variables you may need to solve a problem, how to conceptualize the give and take with IFTTT on paper before creating your logicblocks, etc.

[Anna]

Hi @chipito!

Your question is a great one: how does one translate a problem into variables, actions, triggers… I’ve written this article with a few examples in increasing complexity and I hope this gives you ideas and strategies to determine these building blocks in your solution:

How to choose your variable, trigger and actions

In some cases, when you are creating a smart home solution it might not look like it is straightforward to choose your variables, logicblock triggers and actions. Don’t worry, sometimes we need to do a bit of analysis upfront to best decide how to set everything up and make our solutions come true. In this article, we are going to look into a few examples that progressively increase in “smart” complexity, and see how we would identify the different pieces in our solution so it can be fully auto…

Let me know your thoughts, thanks so much!

[chipito]

Anna, wow and thank you! I will check that out when I have time (unfortunately not for a couple weeks).

One additional thought I had is that maybe there is a scripting language that Apilio is very similar to for which a beginners guide already exists. Something where most of the concepts would apply to Apilio. But it looks like what have done may be exactly what I need!

[jrmckins]

The trick is really taking the time to break down the problem. I’ve helped numerous people and and always start with “what are you trying to do” Then I repeat it, trying to simplify it. We end up with a bunch of simple steps. I advise the person to start small and add on. I have a couple of examples here https://www.reddit.com/r/apilio/