Digitized Daniel

Light controller function demo
Pomodoro Timer Set
Meme Generator
Facial Recognition "WakerUpper"
Search Function
Meme Machine

Inspiration

With both of us being Computer Engineering students at Ryerson, we spend a lot of time in the ECE Discord server, which houses the ECE bot to handle a lot of automation and other tasks. We wanted to create our own Discord bot that also serves more than one purpose, and has a variety of features that are useful, fun, and simple to use.

What it does

Digitized Daniel has various built-in commands to accomplish tasks. The current list of features is listed below:

Control smart devices such as Tuya smart lights
Use facial detection to wake you up if you're dozing off at your desk
Search the web and return the first result in Discord
Set a Pomodoro Timer to help with staying focused while studying
Meme Generator to create your own memes text and various templates
Meme Machine to display a random meme gif on Discord

How we built it

Digitized Daniel was built entirely using Python. We used the nextcord API to set up the bot and create functions. Using cogs we were able to create a branch in our GitHub repository for each function to work on them separately, without cluttering the main file. This not only makes collaboration much simpler, it greatly increases readability. To build the functions: various tutorials, videos, and the nextcord documentation were used to help us with the syntax.

Challenges we ran into

Working with GitHub was a bit of a struggle at first. There is certainly a learning curve there, but I'm proud of how we overcame it and managed to collaborate using GitHub. Finding resources online to help navigate nextcord was a bit challenging at times, considering how many online tutorials used the now discontinued discord.py, however we were able to make the adjustments and adapt our bot to the new API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The size of it! Considering the time we had to work on it, Digitized Daniel is chock-full of features that are all made with a lot of thought gone into them. Some features are more geared towards studying, while some are more for fun, and we believe thats what Discord is all about; having a good balance between the two, especially with the heavy workload we face as engineering students.

What we learned

A lot about Discord bots and larger Python projects in general. With both of us using Discord so much in our day-to-day lives, its refreshing to be on the making side of bots, rather than the end user. We learned how to collaborate effectively using GitHub, a skill we'll definitely need throughout our careers.

What's next for Digitized Daniel

More features! There were a few features that unfortunately had to be cut due to time constraints, such as a weather feature to display the current temperature in your city using the OpenWeather API, a music controller using the Spotify API, and a few other fun features. In the future we'd love to continue work on Digitized Daniel and add these features, as well as many others as we think of more features we'd like to see in a bot.