cloud-mei

Do you ever have trouble checking canvas? No? Me too, but worry no longer. With the power of cloud-mei, you can have notifications sent directly to your phone in real time. WOW. Now on AWS Lambda.

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Inspiration

I'm a chronic procrastinator. My motto is "best work happens last" Unfortunately, that can become an issue when you are also as unorganized as I am. So I wanted a system that automatically notifies me about incoming due dates. When I discovered that Canvas had an API, I saw my shot. 24 hours of caffeine, here we stand with cloud-mei.

What it does

Cloud-mei is cloud deployed application that checks for assignments periodically, and then constantly checks when they're due. When the deadline falls below a threshold, the program sends a notification to your mobile device informing you of how much time you have left.

How we built it

We used the canvasapi python wrapper to pull assignment data from canvas, and the twilio api to text users updates. The program checks regularly with the assignment tracker class, which keeps a list of all of our assignments.

Challenges we ran into

Our most time consuming problem was getting the code to run in AWS. Besides this, we had difficulty making our code update frequently without overloading the api.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We take great pride in having created an app that may help many students with their homework. Every student knows the sinking feeling of finding out they've missed an assignment, and our app should help make those moments rare.

What we learned

We learned how to deploy code onto AWS, as well as threading and a fair amount of OAuth.

What's next for cloud-mei

cloud-mei is mostly for personal use at the moment, but if we can take in user data as json, it may be possible to set up a webserver that allows students to set up their own instances of cloud-mei. It's possible we could even implement cloud-mei into Canvas itself!

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