I’d like to commit to hitting the gym every day. Last time I used IFTTT to track my GPS position, but today I’m lucky enough to have the gym at the first floor of my building.
Yet I have noticed a QR Code that I could scan every day to serve the same purpose. Yet I didn’t figure out how I could make that work. I tried to explore Zapier as the first 100 task are free.
Do you have any suggestion on how I could achieve that?
There are certainly some users who have done this successfully with QR codes connecting to IFTTT, which in turn talks to Beeminder. See this as an example.
I guess you’ve already seen the Beeminder page on IFTTT over here; there’s already one for gym based on location, which was perhaps the one you already used!
Zapier also has inbound webhooks – I use those to chain my Beeminder goals together.
Once you have a URL that triggers a zap to increment your goal, you can generate your own QR codes in a number of ways. For mine I’ve used https://www.qrcoder.co.uk/
Then, of course, you need to find somewhere to put the QR code so that you can scan it, but that other people aren’t likely to increment your goal.
You may be able to do this through a ritual, such as putting it in your gym bag and only ever scanning it after arriving at the gym.
I’ve previously used Zapier to use a Swarm/Foursquare checkin to trigger a zap, and something like that, combined with a ritual of only ever triggering it in a specific context, could avoid using a QR code at all.
I used to have an alarm app that would let you register any arbitrary QR or bar code and scan that to turn off the alarm. So you could use the bar code on your morning cereal, or you could cut out a QR code from something and put it on your fridge or in the bathroom. Is there a way to do that with Beeminder, such that you don’t have to create a new QR code, but could use an existing one that’s already out in the world somewhere?
Sounds like something that could be added to the apps. 
Ooh. You’re a genius, you are.
It turns out that all the pieces are available in the iOS Shortcuts scripting tool. (You 'droid users can doubtless figure out something similar.)
Here’s what it looks like:
Obviously you could make it smarter, say using a dictionary so that the barcode value chooses the goal to increment.
Equally obviously, you’ll have to replace the YOURTHINGHERE placeholders with real values, notably:
Here’s the link to the recipe pictured above, which should let you copy it into your own shortcuts library and amend it from there.
UPDATE: new version that uses a dictionary so that one shortcut can increment any of several goals:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d41088c4d0fd47dfb6b186118cd9e16d
