Zapier Integration

Timing is everything, or at least goes a long way towards making a digital signage deployment successful. Concise, engaging content is very important, of course, but equally important is getting that content in front of your audience at the right time.

The Revel Digital CMS has a wide range of smart scheduling tools available for precise targeting of content based on various conditions including geolocation, face detection, motion sensing, etc. New to the mix is our recent integration with Zapier. Zapier is an automation tool with hooks into most any web-based service platform you can think of such as Slack, Mail Chimp, and Gmail. With Zapier it's possible to not only trigger digital signage content in real-time but also modify content with data provided by the trigger. 

Let's check out a few examples.

A simple example is triggering content based on a weather condition. In this case, we want to include certain content in our playlist when it's forecast for rain.

Connect your Revel Digital account to Zapier

Of course, you'll need a Zapier account for this, which is free, so go ahead and create one now.

Once your account is up and running, Click Apps to link your Revel Digital account to Zapier.

Search for Revel Digital and click on the app.

A popup will appear requesting your Revel Digital developer API key.

 

API keys are available in your Revel Digital account under Account Information > Developer API > Generate New API Key, or find it by following this link https://as1.reveldigital.com/account/api. Generate and copy a key into the popup box.

Once connected, you will be able to utilize the Revel Digital app with any Zaps you wish to create.

Create a Zap

Click Zaps on your Zapier dashboard, then 'Make a New Zap'

For the trigger, we will search for weather. This brings up a few options of which we will select Weather by Zapier.

On the next page we will choose the event 'Will it rain today?'

Next, configure the trigger with your location and temperature unit. To find your location you can use this tool: https://www.latlong.net

Now we need to perform an action for this event. Search for Revel Digital and select it for your app.

Choose 'Send Command to Device' as the action you wish to perform.

Next, we configure the action with the target device from your Revel Digital account, along with the command name and argument. Use 'weather' for the command name, and 'rain' for the argument.

 

Now we can test and if successful we can turn the Zap on for use!

 

Add triggers to your Revel Digital content

Our Zap will now send a command to the player we configured when the forecast calls for rain. This allows us to use the Command scheduling condition to determine whether or not to include certain content in our playlist rotation.

Edit any playlist in your account, and select an item you wish to apply the condition to.

 

Click on an existing playlist item, or add a new item. Then click the 'Schedule' tab to add our condition.

Save this item and you're done.

 

Things to try

• Command scheduling works for both playlist items AND top-level device schedules
• Create a Google Calendar Zap to wish happy birthday to employees
• Create a Slack Zap to change signage content instantly based on channel messages