Canary Bot

Inspiration

• Creating an entertaining social experiment using social networks
• Using and experimenting with new hardware and software (inspiration for the use of the tessel board camera and twitter APIs)
• Twitch plays Pokemon's user interaction

How it works

The Canary Bot waits for someone to tweet at it, and tweets a photo from a camera attached to a tessel and mentions the person in the tweet.

It uses a variety of processes to achieve this:

• python script to constantly take pictures from the tessel camera module
• javascript using the tweepy API to send tweets
• twitter streaming API to react to mentions of our twitter handle
• motors connected to a F38x board to allow control of the camera's position
• hardware to communicate between motors and F38x

Challenges we ran into

• Getting the twitter streaming API to function properly
• Learning new syntax for CSS, javascript and python
• Making the tessel continuously take pictures using timers

Accomplishments that we are proud of

• Finishing our hack completely even though it is our first hackathon
• Using a variety of software and hardware technology in our hack
• Accomplishing the goal that we set out to do from the beginning

What we learned

• Various software languages and APIs (javascript, python, tweepy API, twitter streaming API)
• How to build a website using CSS
• Hacking is fun

What's next for The Canary Bot

• Face recognition software to take photos when it sees a face
• Put it into areas that have high traffic (eg. events) to get live tweet photos of the event
• Put it onto a car as it goes on a road trip, live follow a road trip through tweets, get pictures whenever you want

Built With

• javascript
• node.js
• python
• servo
• tessel