Minimalist Broadcaster

Inspiration

I have a habit of checking my phone every five minutes. So I thought why not make something that can help me keep away from my phone while keeping me up to date with the world.

What it does

It scrapes tweets from your twitter account and broadcasts them over a topic. The raspberry pi which is subscribed to the same topic receives the tweet and reads it out loud over speaker.

How I built it

So the whole thing is divided into 3 parts:- trigger, scrapper and node. For triggering the action of scraping and sending tweet over the topic, I have used circuit playground. Pressing button B on Circuit Playground triggers a UiPath sequence which opens twitter in a browser, scrapes tweets from it and saves it in a csv file. When we press button A, Circuit Playground reads the tweets from csv file and sends them over the topic. On the other side, we have a raspberry pi which is hooked up to a speaker and on receiving the tweets reads them out loud using speech synthesis. The chat application itself is built upon Hedera's js chat demo. Using this, I was able to leverage the advantage of making the application distributed and serverless.

Challenges I ran into

It took me a while to figure out how I could read out the incoming messages using javascript.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I successfully built the application I wanted to build.

What I learned

This was my first time working with node and javascript so learnt to use those two.

What's next for Minimalist Broadcaster

Adding functionality for other social media platforms too.

Built With

• circuitplayground
• hedera
• javascript
• raspberry-pi
• uipath