With the currently high temperatures (30 degrees Celsius outside) my pandaboard in a box ™ runs a little hotter then what I like. Currently it easily sits above 60 degrees.  So I decided to add a little fan. However, fans make an awful lot of noise, so we do not want to run the fan, if not needed. So I decided to use one of the GPIO pins on the pandaboard. So after doing some level conversion & inversion (1.8 -> 5V)  I could safely switch on/off the fan.

Now to make it temperature controlled, this is where IfThenElse pops in:

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[Timeout]
type=TimerTrigger
timeout=15
action=CheckTemp
 
[CheckTemp]
type=ExternalToolCheck
cmd=bash -c "if [ `cat /sys/class/gpio/gpio39/value` = 1 ]; then test `cat /sys/devices/platform/omap/omap4plus_scm.0/temp_sensor_hwmon.0/temp1_input` -gt 58000; else test `cat /sys/devices/platform/omap/omap4plus_scm.0/temp_sensor_hwmon.0/temp1_input` -gt 50000; fi"
compare-old-state=true
true-status=
false-status=1
then-action=TurnOnFan
else-action=TurnOffFan
 
[TurnOffFan]
type=ExternalToolAction
cmd=bash -c "echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio39/value"
 
[TurnOnFan]
type=ExternalToolAction
cmd=bash -c "echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio39/value"

As you can see, I was lazy and did part of the IfThenElse using bash.. Bad Bad me. (but just showing that you can!)