Discord Computer Systems Engineering attendance bot

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the fact that the timetable often got confusing (especially in lockdowns, when concepts 'Monday' and 'Tuesday' seemed to blur into 'awake time' and 'asleep time'), so to rectify that our initial idea was to create a bot that automatically did the attendance for us. We ran into some issues with this (see below) and decided to modify the idea slightly to be more suitable

What it does

The bot sits in the server created for Computer Systems Engineering (CSE) students, and runs a background task every 30 minutes to check if the current time is the start time of a lecture (subtract 3 minutes) and uses the discord mention feature (@) to remind every student that the lecture applies to that the lecture is in 3 minutes First you have to add your timetable to it (using the $timetable) command, and then it adds you to the list of recognised users

How we built it

We built it in python, using the 'discord.py' API. This allowed us access into creating a bot, and administering commands and events to said bot. To link our coded bot to a physical bot in the server, the 'discord developer portal' was used to create that physical bot and give it the necessary permissions

Challenges we ran into

One challenge with the initial idea was that it would require web access and the sensitive email and password information of each student- which we decided would not be safe (as even though the bot would encrypt it, we would know how to decrypt it- having made the encryption). To combat this, we decided that instead it would remind you based on a timetable upload This brought in its own issues however- like "how to convert from an icalendar file to a suitable python dictionary", "what information is necessary and what is not", "how to keep the task running"

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of the system that converts from an icalendar file to a python dictionary. It only stores relevant information, and only overwrites duplicate lectures (as the lectures aren't scheduled to repeat, but rather each week has a new set of lectures with a different date), while also deleting old lectures (such as when a timetable change occured early within the term, that lecture still exists as an event, but isn't used) We're also proud of the error handling within the bot. It only accepts the '.ics' file with a certain file name (to help with data extraction)

What we learned

We learned how to use the discord.py API, and some multi-threading asynchronous functions. Furthermore, we also learnt the basics of function decorators, and how to create and utilise discord bots