UCI Announcements Discord BOT

Discord BOT that can read any google calendar, ical or canvas account and tell you todays events! Can be used in any server.

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Inspiration

  • Since the beginning of COVID people have flocked to numerous social media platforms in order to simulate the same sense of community which they once had. Discord being a popular platform beforehand primarily for gamers, boomed in popularity. A wider audience began to embrace Discord than ever before. Multitudes of servers were created where people would chat, share information or collaborate on projects. Though now with living almost completely online, the passage of time seemed to blur together and people would have to rush in a panic with a sudden realization of an approaching deadline. We created a bot which would announce any event you had approaching whether in your google calendar, ical or canvas account, with a few simple commands. We accomplished this using calendars ICS files, python, discord, and AWS EC2 for hosting the application.

What it does

  • The bot will look for the message !events and once it sees this it will announce all the events for today from one up to five calendars depending on how many you have in calendar. We included error handling where if the link is invalid or the calendar is private, the bot will send the user a message with what link caused the error.

How I built it

  • Had team build separate parts in which discord.py was used as the "groundwork"
  • Put them together to run the bot
  • Used python to build
  • Hosted the bot using AWS EC-2 so that users wouldn’t have to worry about running the bot on their own machines and even the most tech-illiterate would be able to add the bot their server

Challenges I ran into

  • Learning how to use the ec-2 server
  • Learning the discord.py library
  • Learning how to use github

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Making a useful Discord bot
  • Having the bot run asynchronous on multiple diff servers
  • For some of us, hosting our first app online

What I learned

  • The workings of the discord library
  • How a hackathon feels like!
  • How to work on software with multiple people (establishing a workflow)
  • Linux skills
  • Integration and use of a parser

What's next for UCI Announcements Discord BOT

  • Creating events from the discord channel i.e. 7am message every day for events

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