MealHop

Inspiration

Picture this. Your office uses Cisco Spark for communication and productivity. We wanted to build a bot for Cisco Spark that would help make your day a little easier. Introducing MealHop, a spark bot that will organize your lunch plans into a collective order.

What it does

Add MealHop to a group within Spark to see him introduce himself and what he does. When you start a lunch order and set a countdown in minutes, MealHop will begin collecting orders for each person (multiple items separated by commas) in the group and attach a link to the restaurant within the set zip code (right now it is defaulted to Evanston). Each person can call functions to:

• Set the zipcode
• Edit their order
• See where the order is for, if they forgot
• Delete their order
• Add to their order
• Cancel the entire lunch order

MealHop will remind you one minute before the end of the lunch order, after which he will return the finalized list of lunch orders for that restaurant.

How we built it

We used a spark bot template in Cloud9. We also used the Google Places API

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time trying to set up the botkit, but failed miserably because we had trouble setting up the local tunneling. So, we scrapped that and wrote the bot from scratch using the original spark bot template. We did all of our coding in Cloud9, which was quite finicky. Sometimes it would not run our code for some miscellaneous error for an extended period of time, which we needed to just wait out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first hackathon for all of us! We started a project from scratch and set a scope that we believed could be completed during the hackathon, which we met. None of us are familiar with node.js or Cisco Spark, so we're proud that we were able to work collaboratively and figure it out, teaching each other. John, who integrated the Google Places, had a lot of trouble given the libraries were years old, but was able to figure it out with great accuracy.

What we learned

We learned how to react to a scenario in a completely new environment, since we were not previously familiar with any of the tools that we decided to use, and seeing how a time span translates into proper project management was very interesting for us; we learned when it was time to to stop pursuing an idea or limit our scope.

What's next for MealHop

MealHop was built with the Spark bot template, but ultimately we'd like to figure out how to use the botkit template, so that we could take advantage of that available functionality, such as natural language processing. We'd also like to set MealHop to push direct messages to the people in a group to streamline orders and provide even more capabilities. Right now, the people have to manually change the zip code but we'd like to find a way to access the office's zip code automatically.

Built With

• google-places
• node.js
• spark-api