Trip Planner

Inspiration

What sparked the idea of making Trip Planner was finding a way to make the use of Discord bots to do research for users. Nowadays, a large number of people go onto Discord on a daily basis. Our goal was to create a bot that could help make planning trips easier and more efficient, without having to open a single browser tab. Instead of having to scroll through pages and pages of various websites, we created a quick and simple way to plan for your next trip by simply typing in a Discord server. Rather than avoiding advertisements and doing painstaking research, our team programmed a Discord bot that can make your life easier.

What it does

Trip Planner is capable of executing a wide variety of tasks. From telling the weather to giving brief descriptions of countries, this Discord bot is everything you need to plan your trip. The main purpose for our bot, as the name suggests, is to assist users in planning their next vacation. With various commands at the user's disposal, you can effectively get information about a country you may wish to visit, or add a location to a list of places you plan on traveling to. In addition to that, our team also gave this Discord bot a few extra features specifically made for the purposes of this Hackathon. As a fun challenge to the members of our team, we decided to add some commands that were inspired by some of the other prompts we were given for this competition. For example, we have a command that allows the user to get a random motivational quote that encompasses the theme of productivity and also the theme of spicing up your life.

How we built it

Our Discord bot, Trip Planner, was built using Discord.py. Together, our team organized and divided the work amongst ourselves to ensure we could complete this project before the deadline.

Challenges we ran into

Our road to a successful and complete project for LyonHacks III was a long and bumpy one. Our journey was difficult and we encountered many challenges on the way. On the first day of this event, our members were eager to begin this exciting project, with many bright ideas and great morale. The very first idea we came up with was to make an app that the user could add and remove tasks from. Our idea was to create an app that could act as a to-do list and remind the user to do jobs (using Python and Kivy). However, after plentiful hours of rushing through tutorials and reading documentation, the members of my team soon realized that trying to learn something most of us had no experience with in 3 days was not going to work. So we scrapped that idea and soon after, we came up with something new. A command-line trip planning app using Python and Typer. But unfortunately, we still had not learned our lesson about trying to speedrun learning new things in such short amounts of time. Once again, our team read through pages and pages of documentation, desperately trying to grasp and apply new knowledge. And in the blink of an eye, it was already the last day of the Hackathon. On this final day, we learned that one of our key members had fallen ill and everyone else was lost and dispirited. Our ideas were consistently failing and we had not thought of anything new yet. The remaining two members of the team were busy in the morning, and only had the opportunity to work on the code in the afternoon. For a short amount of time, we worked on the idea from before; the command-line trip planning app. In the end though, one of our team members came up with the idea of doing the same thing but with a Discord bot instead. This was an area the two of us both had prior experience in. For several hours on end we wrote code as quickly as humanly possible. Finally, finally, we created a functioning bot in the nick of time. Multiple commands we wished to add were scraped along the way due to lack of time. Even as I write this it is 11:57 PM. In the nick of time, we managed to complete this project.