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Bot commands in action
Inspiration
While COVID-19's current impact has lessened since 2020, it is still an ever present and persistent threat. I wanted to create a Discord bot that had meaning, and was more outside the realms of Discord's niche - gaming. I feel like a Discord bot that gives people access to healthier lifestyle options in the form of COVID-19 information and guidance, can have a positive impact on vaccination numbers.
What it does
The COVID Bot has 4 commands, each providing some sort of information on COVID-19 or an avenue to seek diagnosis or vaccination for users. The bot provides current, worldwide, COVID-19 case numbers, it provides users the ability to request a free at-home COVID-19 test kit from the USPS, it allows users to search for vaccine locations in their area, and allows users to visit the CDC's website for further information regarding COVID-19. The bot also features a command that returns a local community's case and death statistics utilizing the CDC's API.
How we built it
The bot was built using Discord.py/PyCord, and utilizing numerous modules - most notably addfips and uszipcode.
Challenges we ran into
A lot of challenges. I have never built a successful web scraper in Python before as I've never had any reason to, but the first command built in the bot was a web scraper. I've also never used an API call request before, and getting that to work was actually the easiest part - the hard part was where the above modules came into play, getting a location based on an integer input (zipcode) and then converting that zipcode to FIPS, so that the API could be accessed by a direct county, rather than a broader search of a state. I've learned a lot with this bot.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm proud of the entire bot. Most bots I've created in the past were simple in comparison - often utilizing lists to return information I needed. Having accessed an API, I'm very proud of the bot and it's capabilities that could be expanded to return even more information with the CDC's API.
What we learned
I learned how to parse and return JSON keys, how to access an API with API key.
What's next for COVID-19 Discord Bot
Who knows - maybe expand it some more to return more local information and then get it into some of my servers for use.
