Inspiration
Discord bots are incredibly powerful and popular, as they’re able to moderate huge servers with relative ease. Also, they have lots of for-fun capabilities–many of them can display cool or funny images or play little games, such as trivia quizzes. Because this hackathon was spaced themed, we thought "Why not try to make a discord bot, but for space!"
What it does
Our SpaceLizard can give you little trivia questions relating to astronomy. Additionally, it can show you astronomy-related pictures, most often of other celestial objects, but also of things like rockets and spaceships. Finally, SpaceLizard can give you a list of asteroids passing by Earth in the new future. How cool!
How we built it
Both of us had ideas for the Discord bot, but we needed a working Discord bot first. After we successfully made a working, basic bot, both of us individually worked on commands, before merging our code together. We run our bot on one central python script, which connects to multiple APIs such as NASA APIs and the Discord API. The trivia quiz command also queries from an sqlite3 database.
Challenges we ran into
We really wanted to have interactive buttons for almost every command for SpaceLizard. However, they were very difficult to work with, so we were unable to implement them for everything due to time constraints.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We overcame a very steep learning curve, using unfamiliar APIs in an unfamiliar language (We wrote it in Python, but are learning C++ right now).
What we learned
Apart from the technical skills in Python and SQL, we learned the power of friendship. We also got familiar with how Discord bots are run.
What's next for SpaceLizard
SpaceLizard will enjoy a nice retirement eating copious amounts of bugs while suntanning on a nice, warm rock.
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