AirAware Bot

Inspiration

Our inspiration, while addressed with time restrictions and experience limitations, we felt air pollution would be the most versatile aspect to incorporate with technology, considering the impact of something so intangible yet impactful and dynamic as air, it felt appropriate to also acknowledge how similar it ties with the effects of technology as well.

What it does

The project submitted is a bot on discord that reports the recent air quality index of cities in Canada. The bot responds to the call ' !aa ' CITY_NAME where the city name should be a city in Canada. With that, the bot will report back with the city name, AQI, type of risk, and an image randomly generated that suggests ways to improve your region's air quality in your everyday life. If the user inputs a city the bot does not have data on, the bot will return N/A for both entries and provides the user a link to an initiative where we aim to get more regions documented and in turn, bring awareness to said area.

How we built it

We built our project with Autocode and the reliable templates provided. The bot demanded a little more personalization than offered in the tools autofill so we had to work on the javascript portion which became its own side project.

Challenges we ran into

Our original plan had us working on a web app alongside the discord bot. Being first-year hackers, our team was only familiar with the C language. Throughout this project, we worked to learn HTML and javascript in order to accomplish what we had set out and eventually decided to scrap the web app and put all our energy into using the tools at hand. We struggled with including a visual element to our project, being that C language is not inherently graphically stimulating, so we had to branch out and learn new skills to perfect our design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The TimBits team is very proud of our ability to pick up new languages and developmental tools to execute a project that we all carried a passion for. Normally, we struggle with time and agreeing on the perfect project proposition, but this event has shown us that we are able to work effectively and manage our time well all while sharpening our technical skills and still having fun. We are most proud of our progress throughout the hackathon.

What we learned

Through lots of trial and error that came with this hackathon, ultimately our team learned how to optimize the tools provided in the Autocode platform to design a visually stimulating, interactive and informative project that aims to better the planet. Along the way, we picked up on some javascript, HTML and CSS that may not have all made their way into our final product, but has taught us important skills that were carried into our very own AQI discord bot.

What's next for AirAware Bot

Regarding our project as a whole, we see our Air Aware bot as simply one piece to the issue we would like to solve at hand. Our entire concept was revolving around open source data and public awareness, and so perhaps with more development and experience, the next step for our project would be to add more concepts, such as developing a webapp, developing a mobile app, or using APIs. For example, we would use an API where it can only update the day-to-day data for the AQI, but can broaden the span of locations to global reports. With the knowledge and skill set we had at hand, we were able to accomplish one portion of that aspect, which is our Discord bot, Air Aware.