Fact Blast

Inspiration

The most useless prize category. We tried to think of a hack to be slightly annoying but overall do nothing

What it does

There is a site to allow people to input phone numbers which are saved to a database. A java program reads the database and sends a text containing a useless random fact every hour to the list of phone numbers.

How I built it

Used node.js to make a website that had a form to submit a name and phone number. The site then sent the name and number to a google firebase database collection. The java program would come read the database and collect the name, phone number, and the random fact to send to the phone number. Java would randomly select a fact for each number and then send out the texts saying, "Hey NAME_HERE I bet you didn't know: Insert_Fact_Here". If the user wants to stop getting messages they can reply stop and they are removed from the send list.

Challenges I ran into

We couldn't connect to the database for hours Couldn't host the java program to run online but finally got it to run on a google virtual machine

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It Works.

What I learned

How to interact with a hosted database from java How to send and receive text messages using java and the Twilio API What google cloud has to offer and what can be done through it How the package manager gradle works for Java

What's next for Fact Blast

We could in turn, instead of using an API from random, useless facts, turn it into maybe something like motivational quotes or sayings that could help people get through tough days. But for now it's useless.

Built With

• firebase
• google-cloud
• java
• javascript
• node.js
• randomfactsapi
• twilio