Automatic Check-Ins with Tasker

As I mentioned in my previous post, I switched to Android at the end of last week. I’m still working on a fairly lengthy post about my thoughts on the Android OS, but I thought I’d post quickly about a tool I’m really enjoying called Tasker.

Tasker automates your phone. That’s a simple way to describe it - a better description is that it’s a true implementation of a smart phone. There’s a great community over at /r/tasker that’ll give you an idea of what kind of things you can do with it, but I thought I’d write about a custom solution for automatic checkins with Foursquare that I’ve found really useful.

Back in 2011, Suffian Siddiqi wrote about his implementation, but it’s become out of date with Foursquare’s v2 API. So here’s my steps for setting up something similar: checking into Foursquare locations based on Wifi Connections.

Foursquare Setup

First, you need to setup a Foursquare app. You can do that on the Developer page. What’s important here is the client key: the redirect and secret won’t be used because we’re not even going to set up a server component.

Once you have these, you’re going to simulate a server flow for using the Foursquare API:

https://foursquare.com/oauth2/authenticate ?client_id=CLIENT_ID &response_type=token &redirect_uri=YOUR_REGISTERED_REDIRECT_URI &v=20140315

Note that as of January 28, 2014, the above v parameter is required to version the API. Thanks to Tim Hall and Hargita Nandor for the heads-up via email.

It’s worth noting again that the redirect is unimportant — the url will work, but once you “authorize” the app, the failed URL will contain your Oauth token. Save this!

A disclaimer: According to Foursquare, this token does not expire. This could change! If things stop working, it might not be a bad idea to make a new app/new key.

Now that you have this, we can set up the actual Tasker system.

Tasker Setup

• Add a new task with a single action: “HTTP Post”.
• For the “Server:Port”, use https://api.foursquare.com.
• For the “Path”, use /v2/checkins/add.
• For the “Data/File”, make two lines: a venueId=%par1 and oauth_token=TOKEN (TOKEN, of course, being our previously saved token)

Make a profile for your location, and use the “State” of “Wifi Connected”, specifying your SSID for your specific network.

Make another task for that profile, and use the action “Perform Task”, with your general checkin task selected. Specify your venue ID as the parameter (%par1) - you can find this usually on the URL for the venue on Foursquare’s website.

Now when you connect to that wifi network, you’ll automatically check in to the specified venue on Foursquare. Add as many of these for different profiles, specifying a new venue ID for each. You may want to set an alert or some sort of notification as a sign of completion: I’m quite fond of the “Notify LED” action.

I’ll go a bit more in-depth into Tasker in my write-up, but I thought this was handy enough that I should get it up beforehand. Viva la Tasker!